Quick question! Can anyone help a newbie get started? I have Tower emulated in a virtual machine and have SITL running. Is there a way to connect both without using any hardware? If not, what hardware do I need to buy? Appreciate any help here, please.
Yes, they can be connected as long as they’re both on the same network.
You can use the --mavproxy-arg to add extra Mavlink outputs from the simulator:
../Tools/autotest/sim_vehicle.py --mavproxy-args=--out=udp:0.0.0.0:15670
The above command will add a SITL output over UDP at port 15670
Hi Stephen. Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, it didn’t work and I still can not connect. Any other suggestions please. I suspect the problem might be because in Android Studio I only can emulate a network 4G internet connection and not a Wifi. Any thoughts on that?
I’ve not used Android Studio, so I’m not too sure how it handles network connections.
My guess is that a 4G network connection will not work, as it’s not designed to connect to local networks. You’ll either need to find a way to emulate a Wifi connection to your local network or find a different emulator.
It seems, I will have to buy an Android device. Thanks for the advice.
Yes, it’s quite easy. But you can buy and new device if you like 
The easiest way to connect is using TCP to the distinct IP on port 5763/5762 I do this often as I run SITL on an AWS instance for convenience
Running SITL on AWS just requires you start MAVProxy in a screen session.
If you are a VM you can use port forwarding in your VM manager to get USP packets in or pipe TCP connections