[Xastir] Wx Alerts

[Tom Russo]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 10:39:00AM -0800, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <warpedspeed1 at yahoo.com> flavor, containing:
> Does anyone know the status of Weather Alerts here in the U.S. ?  
> 
> We have had a few Tornado warnings here in Central Florida today, but no alerts 
> coming across from APRS-IS.  

The original wxsvr server that gated WX alerts from NWS to APRS-IS was taken
down by its maintainer qhite a while ago.  A replacement server was put up by 
Pete Loveall, but he made a decision to gate only alerts that were immediate 
warnings from NWS, unlike the prior server that gated all of them.

Apparently the owner of the previous system had taken a lot of heat from people
about too many non-APRS alerts being gated, so when Pete stepped in to fill in
the gap, he chose to be much more conservative in what he gated.  Unfortunately,
that means that very few NWS alerts really ever show up on APRS in many areas 
--- unless NWS designates the alert as an immediate threat, it doesn't show on 
APRS.  My area is one that went from having a number of WX warnings all the 
time (high wind, high fire danger, dangerous thunderstorms, winter storms, 
etc.) to almost none.

There's really nothing to be done for it other than for someone else to put
up another wxsvr replacement with a less-conservative gating policy and be 
willing to endure the flaming from those who object to wx data on APRS.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
 "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."