The Flying Weather Thingy

jason

Administrator
Management Council Member
Joined
Jul 4, 2006
Messages
5,128
Location
Lincoln, Nebraska
Display Name

Display name:
Jason W (FlyNE)
Ok, there is something going on over on the red board. For those of you that don't go over there, I thought I'd post about it here.

A lot of people (myself included) had found a service called Weathermeister. It was a free service started by Dan Checkoway. It would grab the weather data and display it in some really handy ways. Dan had a donations link on the page and some (myself included) had donated in hopes that it would stay free. He was using freely available data and just displaying it in some nifty ways. Anyway, as sometimes happens in America, Dan recently decided that what he was doing was costing him some money and he started charging for subscriptions to the service. I don't have a problem with that (though I think he's asking for too much money), but I had always respected the fact that he was just doing it to help his fellow aviators, much like Chuck does here at PoA.

Anyway, one of the guys on the Red Board whipped up something similar and is doing a good job with it. Feature requests are still flowing in, and he's doing a good job of implementing them. Check it out. I think he's doing a great job so far.

http://www.tylerworld.com/fwt/

Anyway, I had first heard of Weathermeister over there and had never heard anybody over here say anything about it. I thought I'd point out Tyler's work for those that would like to add something to their pre-flight arsenal. Make sure to click on links and mouse over stuff to pull out all of the really cool data (such as mousing over the winds in the METAR to have it calculate the amount of crosswind for what should be the active runway in use at that airport). Let Tyler know of any cool features that you would like to see and let's help him build this thing up to be something good for the community.
 
That is pretty cool. It is amazing though on the Internet how much you decide you can live without something when people want you to pay for it. I stopped using 100 dollar hamburger for the same reason and now use http://www.adventurepilot.com for my resturant/flying needs.
 
Like I said, I'm ok if he wants to give it a go. That's what America is all about. But it's like you said, you can't subscribe to everything. $2/month here, $6/month there. It really adds up. I liked it, but I didn't like it that much.
 
kind of like 1800anyawos or whatever it was. great when it was free, went broke when it tried to charge.
 
tonycondon said:
kind of like 1800anyawos or whatever it was. great when it was free, went broke when it tried to charge.

Technicall it was probably broke before it charged and was trying to get out from under debt.
 
smigaldi said:
That is pretty cool. It is amazing though on the Internet how much you decide you can live without something when people want you to pay for it. I stopped using 100 dollar hamburger for the same reason and now use http://www.adventurepilot.com for my resturant/flying needs.
100 dollar hamburger already had old data before he made users PAY to give HIM current data, which he claims copyright on.

More than one thing about THAT doesn't quite make sense to me.
 
tonycondon said:
kind of like 1800anyawos or whatever it was. great when it was free, went broke when it tried to charge.

Did they go under now? I know I quit using them when they wanted subscriptions. I got a subscription to Pilot My-Cast on my phone instead, which not only gives me METARs for the airport I'm interested in and surrounding ones, it gives me TAFs, PIREPs, airmets, sigmets, satellite, NEXRAD, all the goodies. Much better.
 
i dunno kent, im assuming so. i also only used them when it was free, and even then it was rarely.
 
$70 a year is just to much for as often as I would use it (maybe 4 trips) and paying monthly $7/ trip is just crazy. I donated $10 when I first used it and have used it twice since then. I can do without it
 
I currently do not and have no reason to pay a subscription to any web page. I cna always get the info from other sources. I have only donated money to one web page because i get hour of enjoyment out of it.
 
My most commonly used weather site is adds.aviationweather.gov

And the price is right.
 
yes it is roger, and with the java tools, you can glean off a lot of information (and good info at that!) in a glance.
 
Back
Top