I think I'm about to become another fan of SkyDemon. I spent a happy afternoon yesterday downloading the trial version and going through the instructions, and it looks very impressive. So much so that I'm thinking of going down the cheapo Chinese GPS route to back up my Garmin Aera.



I have a question about the Weather Stations window and the "Add Airfield" function. It works perfectly, but I'm disappointed to see that any airfields I add don't seem to be saved when I close SD; the window reverts to the default list when I reopen SD.



Or am I doing something wrong?



Thanks for any tips..

Hi



The weather stations relevant to your route are automatically added when you plan a route - you don't usually need to manually add them.



I have a route stored called 'bimble' which is just a large circle of my local area. Opening this route causes all my local weather to be downloaded.



Steve

Thanks, Steve, your experience mirrors mine.



This is an excellent feature - I love the way the weather displays overlaid on the map - but I'd find it helpful if the Weather Stations window on the right worked slightly differently.



I'll see if I can explain.



For info, I'm using the French (SIA) charts only, and I'm looking at the list of a/fields in the Weather Station window on the right of the map.



Let's say I plan a local flight to the west. This brings up the METARs/TAFs for the airfields on my route, or very close to it. It also brings up (in the Weather Stations window) a lot of airfields for which there are no METARs/TAFs available. It would be handy if these didn't appear, but no problem, I can manually delete them.



For the sake of completeness, I'd also like to grab METARs/TAFs for a couple of other a/fields, say to the north and east. Again, no problem, I can add these in a variety of ways.



Here's the crunch: I'd like the Weather Stations window to save my work (a/fields deleted/added) so that, next time I open this route, I don't have to do it all over again.



Not sure if this is possible, and maybe I need to contact Tim?

I think Tim is looking seriously at enhanced wx info. Most of us have some sort of mobile app that does Metars / TAF (e.g. Aero Weather for iphone). But the way Pocket FMS overlays cloud base, wind spreed & direction, sig wx and rain radar is extremely good (radar & wx overlay can be toggeld on/off). Also u can scroll thru hr by hr. Alos winds are 2000, 5000 & 8000 ft.

In my view, short of the fm radio wx feed as in N America, this is best in flight weather feed going  .. remarkably accurate too.

Hoping Tim is going this way.

David

This thread is about the weather registration window and whether it should save additional airfields, not about our potential expansion into different weather sources (which I have said we are working on).

Thanks for the feedback Jenny. You're correct that airfields added to this window are treated as temporary. Basically SkyDemon maintains an internal list of airfields for which it attempts to find weather information, and normally this list is comprised of those airfields within 20nm of your route. The weather registration window exists to allow you to add other airfields to the list.

The potential problem with saving additions to the list is that they would stay there, in a window that isn't visible by default, forever (or until somebody removed them). I can envisage this becoming a problem when you start planning new routes and SkyDemon is still always downloading weather from your original additions.

I do like the idea of being able to nominate some kind of "home airfields" or something for which weather information is obtained as soon as SkyDemon starts, or as soon as you start planning a route. What do you (and others) think of that?

Please add my vote for the home airfield (and a user defineable radius, or airfield list) weather on start up (some/most of our home airfields don't report the weather) and personally I would like to have 4 or 5 airfields weather loaded on startup.

I load a local "bimble" route to force the download of local weather at the moment.

Seasons Greetings, Steve

Aero AT3-R100, C172 Skyhawk, EGBK Sywell

The potential problem with saving additions to the list is that they would stay there, in a window that isn't visible by default, forever (or until somebody removed them). I can envisage this becoming a problem when you start planning new routes and SkyDemon is still always downloading weather from your original additions.



Thanks for your response Tim. I'm still trying to think that through (aren't the planning window and the weather registration windows tied very closely together in that a new route delivers a new set of weather stations, regardless of old inputs?), but an option to nominate "home airfields" would be a very handy addition. I also like AT3's suggestion of a user-definable radius. Is there any way of restricting the weather stations window to show only a/fields for which METARs and TAFs are available? Not hugely important, I admit, but it would make it look neater, perhaps.

I would rather not have the weather window in SD Mobile being "cluttered" with info that is separate from the chosen route.

For local weather, I do not use SD for a general overview of local or regional weather; my SD Mobile device does not have web access and its a sledghammer to crack a nut to have to go to PC, load SD and download weather for a "local or regional" route.

Much easier to use something on my phone, TV wetaher channel, ipad or something thats "always on and to hand".

Then when I have decided where to fly, I plan a route in SD when of course having the TAFs and METARS with me in flight is extremely useful.

So re the subject of this thread, my vote is NOT to add additional data to the weather window.

David