On 2007-02-15, C J Campbell wrote:
Originally, it was limited bandwidth. The system was developed for ancient
Teletype machines working at 400 baud. That is no excuse for not fixing it,
of course, and you can now get plain language weather reports if you want
them. But they can't get rid of the old ones because too many of us
old-timers find reading the abbreviations is actually faster. So, they have
to keep the decrepit old system around as long as there are decrepit old
flyers. :-)

Well, that and everyone in the world (and every weather station) would
need to change all at the same time to remain compatible, or at least
have lots of 'workaround' code to cope with two incompatible systems!

There's really no need for anyone to read raw METAR if they don't want
to.

However, it is useful to do so. Notwithstanding that GPRS has plenty of
bandwidth for 'text only' applications, a raw undecoded TAF for even the
filthiest weather forecast will fit on one screen on my cell phone. This
is extremely convenient (especially since my home airfield is a farm
airfield and doesn't have electricity, let alone a computer - but
there's a cell tower about 1/4 mile away). Even if my cell phone had
4 GBps bandwidth, undecoded TAF would still be much better than plain
language due to the constraint of the screen being so small.

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