[Xastir] Modifications for new Australian Wx Shapefiles

[Lynn W. Deffenbaugh (Mr)]

For those of us that maintain other APRS clients that support NWS alerts 
and shapefiles and (apparently formerly) WXSVR-AU packets, is there a 
page that describes the changes in detail and also a source for the new 
shapefiles?

Lynn (D) - KJ4ERJ - Author of APRSISCE for Windows Mobile and Win32

PS.  I've been wondering about the shape failure messages I've been 
seeing recently.

On 11/25/2011 9:19 PM, Geoff Gatward wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I maintain the Australian WXSVR-AU server, which is the equivelent down
> under of the WXSVR in the US that injects NWS alerts into the APRS-IS.
> When I first developed WXSVR-AU, I intentionally made the format of the
> messages generated identical to the NWS format, so that existing clients
> could display the data. No official shapefiles existed, so a set was
> cobbled together from various sources with exactly the same dbf structure
> and naming convention as the NWS, and this has been working well for a
> couple of years.
>
> Recently however, our Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) has got with the times
> and have begun standardizing their alerting mechanism to include an XML/RSS
> feed, which we are now using to generate the Wx Alerts.  As part of this
> change, they have also published new shapefiles.  I have been working on
> the WXSVR-AU application and now have the new format strings being sent,
> which although present the same data as the NWS, now contain a slightly
> different format of data.
> For example our WX zones here are in the format  NSW_PW001  where NSW is
> the state abbreviation (and some states are 2 chars, others are 3), and PW
> is the alert area type, PW = Public Weather in this case, which corresponds
> to a shapefile named  gfe_public_weather.shp.
>
> I'm not a C programmer, but I have done some hacking with the xastir source
> and I have the new BOM messages displaying.
> The code changes I have made for the most part duplicate portions of the
> NWS logic as new BOM logic, however there is one section in  util.c  that I
> have not been able to figure out how to execute conditionally, and this is
> where I would like some advice.
>
> I'm also not sure what needs to happen next to get these code changes
> merged into the mainline package.
>
> The files I have modified are:  alert.c,  db.c,  maps.c,  util.c
> I have copied the get-NWSdata as get-BOMdata to grab the shapefiles from
> BOM, and created the corresponding dbfawk files.
> These are all in a tarball that can be grabbed from
> http://www.gatwards.org/dumpsite/xjg-xastir.tar
> The format of the BOM message strings can be found at
> http://wxsvr.aprs.net.au/protocol-new.html
>
>
> Would someone like to take a look at these (I have commented my code) and
> clean up any of the code that needs it and merge into the main release, or
> let me know what needs to be done??
>
> Thanks,
> Geoff   VK2XJG / VK8GG
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