Considering installing FSMetar

Hi Art
Have used FS Metar for well over a year now so he's my take. Please use with caution!

I have only ever been able to get VATSIM to work. NOAA will download but not run and IVAO does not even download for me. Spent much time trying to solve this without success and now consider it a non-problem. I can only recall a small number of outages from the VATSIM server so my experiance is that it is reliable and accurate.

I installed it into my Silver Wings FS9 installation where it and its config file reside in a TEMP folder quite happily. I removed FSMetar several times when trying to fix (1.) above and noted no nasty side effects.

It updates pretty frequently, 15-minutes I believe but it also seems to update every time you approach a new met station. You will get an on-screen text message with the current ground conditions but sometimes the message is incomplete or shows NOSIG.

Some caveats:
It replaces the stock weather turbulance with gusts that can make life rather interesting. See:

calclassic.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=fsaviator&action=display&thread=797

You cannot turn off the upper air winds so your weather retains those awful FS wind shifts. I think it mitigates them some but that might be wishful thinking. Passing from station to station seems to be where the problem occurs. The trigger point seems to be 20-30 nm but there are many areas where they seem to overlap and so change more frequently.

You need FSUIPC, an unregistered version will do.

Overall I think it's a nice little utility. I placed the executable icon on my desktop and when setting up a flight, I minimize FS and start FSMetar just before pressing Fly Now. Because it is external it runs on all three of my FS versions from the desktop using the single installation.

Have noticed that on occasions you will start in sort of a "weather hole", that is to say conditions at the starting airport are clear and fine but soon after leaving ambient change considerably. It's almost like you have to trigger the update by flying into the trigger zone after which conditions are more uniform. For some reason this seems to happen most frequently at VLA (Vintage London Airports) Croyden in my GW3 installation when the report shows NOSIG. I don't know why this happens.

Hope this helps.

Chris