Weather Info via a web cell phone

wrote:
I searched the archives & did not see any recent posts on this. I
just upgraded my cell phone to a new one, Sprint Service, that comes
with some type of web access. It has some canned weather sites that
provide simple weather for non-pilots, but am interested in a web site
that will (1) fit well, and is simple to use, on the tiny cell phone
screen and (2) ideally, shows current radar, but SA's would be fine
enough.

I use wunderground.com. Their PDA version is at m.wund.com

Sample showing radar at Raleigh:

http://m.wund.com/US/NC/Raleigh.html

As a followup question, I've been trying to find a way to enter a flight
plan via cell phone. I have access to a host web site where I can run
a cgi program and I was able to create a page that would invoke a
script to run a telnet duats session, but when I try to use it from
the cell phone, I get "Forbidden". I'm guessing that there's some
problem in running cgi scripts from the cell phone browser. All this
techno-babble aside, does anyone know a way to enter a flight plan
via cell phone (other than waiting 30 minutes to talk to FSS)? I
can do it via www.duats.com, but it's pretty painful. I cell phone
interface to the telnet duats would be ideal, but I don't think
these cell phones can do telnet.

I experimented with www.duats.com and aviationweather.gov, the two
that I use with a PC. DUATS wasn't too useful. Aviationweather.gov
actually showed a very good, but tiny, pic of the USA with fields in
IFR/MVFR/VFR that the web site shows on its home page when you first
visit it. And tantalizingly, I was able to "browse" to the radar
section but was never able to pull up a useful radar pic.

I was wondering if any site had optimized their site for phone web so
that it would be easy to type in a 4 letter designator and pull up an
SA. For my type of flying this woudl be really useful as during the
summer it invariably involves setting down in front of a line of
cells, getting a pic of the weather,and "threading" through. Many
times this involves setting down in fields where they have apparently
never heard of refrigerated food, much less the internet, so the phone
access is useful. I know I can always call up the FSS but we all know
that calls to the FSS are taking longer nowadays. And the web access
from the phone is free with the service, which is a plus.

Anybody know of any web-phone weather sites out there for pilots?

Thanks in advance,

Hank Rausch


--
Don Poitras - SAS Development - SAS Institute Inc. - SAS Campus Drive
(919) 531-5637 Cary, NC 27513

Don Poitras wrote:

As a followup question, I've been trying to find a way to enter a flight
plan via cell phone. I have access to a host web site where I can run
a cgi program and I was able to create a page that would invoke a
script to run a telnet duats session, but when I try to use it from
the cell phone, I get "Forbidden". I'm guessing that there's some
problem in running cgi scripts from the cell phone browser. All this
techno-babble aside, does anyone know a way to enter a flight plan
via cell phone (other than waiting 30 minutes to talk to FSS)? I
can do it via www.duats.com, but it's pretty painful. I cell phone
interface to the telnet duats would be ideal, but I don't think
these cell phones can do telnet.

Didn't there used to be a way to just call in a flight plan and
leave it on a recording? I did that once or twice some years
ago and have forgotten about till now. Seems like that would
be the best bet. You basically read it off as it appears on
the flight plan form.