[Xastir] Weather Polygons

[Curt, WE7U]

On Mon, 20 Jun 2011, Christian Reynolds wrote:

> Over the last year or so, I know that the NWS changed from a county warning format to a sub-county polygon storm track.  Since then, my polygons have gone, and I no longer see the shading of the weather alert maps, in terms of shading a county for a watch box.

> I am looking for severe weather polygons, Watches, Warnings, and MesoScale Discussions.

More happened than just that!  Dale Huguley wrote the WXSVR and ran it for several years.  It was really sweet and was up most of the time.  That's the system that was generating the APRS strings out of the NWS data, triggering all the APRS software to color in the areas.

I want to publicly thank Dale for writing/maintaining it during those years.  It was an amazing service that was truly needed!

Dale shut down the weather server a while back (2 years ago?).  About a year later, Pete created a new WXSVR, but decided to put out only the most severe weather alerts to the APRS-IS feeds.

I came along later and decided that I wanted more alerts yet, so I wrote yet another WXSVR.  I'm putting out the same alerts as Pete plus most of the rest that Dale used to generate.  Mine are going to "Firenet.us" instead of the APRS-IS.

So...  If you want more weather alerts, hook up to Firenet.us port 14580 (filtered port) and put in something like:  "t/n e/WE7U-WX" as your filter.  That last part is to overcome a bug in the server code where it doesn't handle lower-case characters in weather alert strings.

I believe the things we are still missing are the severe weather warning polygons.  Maybe Pete is doing those too, I don't recall right now.

I planned to get the WE7U-WX server code running in a couple more places but have been too busy/distracted to get that done.  When complete I'll have the same S/W running at three geographically separate locations.  Of course with Field Day coming up I won't get to it this week either!

-- 
Curt, WE7U.        http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
APRS Client Capabilities:  http://www.eskimo.com/~archer/aprs_capabilities.html