Following on from the release of Audio For VATSIM (AFV) for the respective network several months ago, the XSquawkBox client has been updated to version 2.0.

Six betas preluded the official release, in which version 2 is intended to fully support AFV. Other features that were supposed to originally be distributed in this version, such as VR support and Vulkan compatibility, have been deferred to version 3.

The changelog to this release, according to a post earlier this week, consists of six key points.

• Fixed a cosmetic bug where XSB OBSs would register themselves as servicing 99.998MHz instead of VATSIM’s standard 199.998MHz.
• We now mangle the malformed x.x20 and x.x70 frequencies to their correct form (x.x25 and x.x75) when displayed, and normalise all frequency usage correctly for the respective service. Hopefully this ends the confusion over what to tune, and radios not working as expected.
• We also now normalise the HF Alias list to ensure we match frequencies correctly due to the discovery that not only did our behaviour not match the expected one for .x25/.x75 aliases, but the actual alias list itself contained inconsistencies.
• Make sure that command-entered frequencies (// and ///) are rounded to valid channels.
• Verbosely report when we’re connecting and disconnecting from VATSIM AFV (Voice) as AFV service issues causing silent failures have been confusing end-users.
• AFV-Native: Disable Nagle (where possible) on HTTP connections per the insistence of the AFV team. This is expected to be zero net change as curl buffers HTTP requests properly, but will eliminate any edge-cases where the AFV servers delayed ACK can cause a short (200ms) delay in finishing a HTTP POST.

It was also stated that the previous version, 1.3.3, will be deauthorised from the network and that only 2.0 will work in the near future.

The client is available for download from its website.