Originally posted by EHM-1980 Brian
thats great news Matt welcome aboard mate..... 
;D - i tried out online flying tonight and what an experience i had!! flew from LPPT to EGBB just as a practise flight before i fly real euroharmony routes online and let me tell you i was almost half an hour on the ground before making sense of it all....... but i managed to get off the ground and everything was going well until i crossed the border of portugal and spain when i was advised to go to a UNICOM radio frequency..... that was fine but i had no ATC for the rest of the flight?? what is UNICOM and how do you get off it so you can go back to ATC?
Firstly, thanks Brain!
This isn't really the place to discuss this, but I'll give you a brief explanation, and if you still have problems, just U2U me!
Unicom is a radio used when there is no ATC around. Especially Birmingham. In IVAO, Birmingham is not very popular, while on VATSIM, it is very popular.
If ATC tells you to go onto Unicom, go there, and all pilots that are in no ATC are also there. You just type in your intentions, if there is traffic around you, so they know what you are doing. You will stay in UNICOM until you get back into ATC airspace. the way you know whether you're in ATC airspace, is the controller will send you a message.
Hope that helps! This sounds bad, but I find unfortunately, that you spend alot more time in UNICOM rather than in ATC airspace.
