How to add Flight Simulator Garmin GPS in our products

If you want to add the GPS provided with FS into an existing panel, you just need to edit the panel.cfg file with a text editor such as Notepad. Go through the following steps and you will make it…

Note: If you read <FS Install Dir>, it references the installation directory of Flight Simulator.
By default, it is:

• for FS2004: c:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator9
• for FSX: c:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\FSX

STEP1 - Locate the aircraft directory.
The panel you want to edit is located in the directory of the aircraft that uses it, so you first need to locate the aircraft.

• - FS2004:
  The aircrafts are located in the “Aircraft” directory, which is into the FS2004 installation directory.
  By default, it is “c:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator9\Aircraft”
• - FSX:
  The aircrafts are located in the “<FS Install Dir>\SimObjects\Airplanes” directory.

In the aircraft directory, you can see 1 sub-directory for each aircraft. You can locate the aircraft in which you want to add the GPS through its name.

STEP2 - Locate and open the panel.cfg file to be edited.
Open the aircraft directory. It contains a sub-directory named “panel”. Open it, the panel.cfg file that you need to edit is here.
It is a text file that can be edited with a text editor. You can use Notepad or Wordpad for this. Right click the file, then select “Send To…”, then Notepad.

STEP3 - Locate the useful file section.
The panel.cfg file that appears is composed of several sections. The sections are identified by their name, which is written between square brackets.
The interesting section for you here is the [Window Titles] section, shows as this in the file:

STEP4 - Reference a new window.
The GPS that you want to add will be placed in an additional panel window. This is why you need to define a new window in the panel.cfg.
To do this, have a look at the window list in the [Window Title] section. You can see there is a number for each window defined in this list. Now you just have to create a window which number is the highest window number + 1.
In this example, the highest window number is 14, so you will have to create the window number 15.

After the latest window definition, add a new line like this:
windowXX=GPS

(where XX is the window number)

In this example, the [Window Title] section then looks like this:

The new window is referenced in the window list, it now needs to be defined.

STEP5 - Create the new window definition.
You now need to add a new section if the file. You can place it wherever you want, I suggest that you create it at the end of the file.
Move to the end of the file and add the following lines:

[WindowXX]
Background_Color=0,0,0
size_mm=456,378
window_size=0.5
position=8
visible=0
ident=GPS_PANEL

gauge00=fs9gps!gps_500, 0,0

In this example, the file would look like this:

It is done…

Now you can run FS2004 or FSX and see how the modified panel looks. When you load the aircraft, the GPS is not visible by default, so you need to show it. To do this, open the FS pull down menu “Views > Instrument Panel” and you can see the list of available windows defined in the panel. At the end of the list, the GPS appears. Select it, and it appears in your panel.

With the panel file used here as an example (the Wilco Airbus Series Volume 1 A320), the modified panel looks like this: