Primarily for general aviation discussion, but other aviation topics are also welcome.
User avatar
By Squadgy
#539999
Just discovered a fairly nifty [url=http://rap.ucar.edu/~dumont/earth/metarLink.kmz]KMZ file[/url] which displays Worldwide METARS in Google Earth - even gives a little symbol giving an instant idea of how good or bad the met is 8)
User avatar
By adrianb
#540011
now imagine that, with a radar overlay, in the cockpit, and voila you have the garmin 496 in the states with XM weather.

its a truly amazing bit of kit!
User avatar
By dublinpilot
PFMS Team
#540017
adrianb wrote:now imagine that, with a radar overlay, in the cockpit, and voila you have the garmin 496 in the states with XM weather.

its a truly amazing bit of kit!


Now imagine you have it with world wide coverage, for less than 10% of the price of the Garmin 496, and you have PocketFMS ;)
User avatar
By Keef
#540031
Does PocketFMS do weather now? The one on my iPaq doesn't :(
By pilotbob
#540110
Keef wrote:Does PocketFMS do weather now? The one on my iPaq doesn't :(


Mine does :lol:
User avatar
By dublinpilot
PFMS Team
#540196
Yes, Keef. Weather symbols (for types of weather such as rain, fog, snow etc), wind barbs for wind strength at various different levels. It also has cloud base forecasts. All this is available for about 48 hours out.

There was a fairly detailed review of PFMS in the December issue of Flyer, you should have a read of it if you haven't seen PFMS in a few years...it's come a long way ;)

PFMS also has weather radar for Europe, USA & Austrailia (possibly Canada too...I'd have to check that one!) Updated every 15 minutes for Europe, and every 5 (I think) for the USA.

But my favourite piece of weather info is the METAR & TAF colour coded circles. These let you see at a glance what type of conditions are reported/forecast at a particular location. They are by default based on the NATO colours. So for example an airport reported as Blue will have the weather that the RAF record as blue.

Personally, I don't like the NATO colour codes, but these are changable to your own colours and conditions.

See this screen shot for example. (This shows the weather circles rather than the radar or weather symbols.

I've set light green circles to what I consider excellent VFR weather, dark green to good VFR weather, Blue to acceptable VFR weather, Yellow to "OK in a push to get a short distance", and orange and red to "forget it".
It's very easy to see in an instant where is good and where is not. Time can also be advanced so that the circles are based on TAF's rather than METARS.

Image

A lot of people do use their mobile phones to update the weather in flight, though I have to admit that I don't bother.

dp