Best mobile Wx Websites

Jim in NC wrote:
How much less bandwidth than with the commercial apps? What you
thinking for a price?

TAFs and METARs are simply downloaded and displayed. They're typically
maybe a hundred bytes each, if that. My app has no real bandwidth
advantage over the web browser if you know the URL for the TAF/METAR
you want and you don't need to load some sort of a query page like ADDS
(hint: try
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/obs...tions/K???.TXT,
replace ??? with a station identifier in caps). RADAR images are GIF
files that are typically 15-30k bytes each. Satellite images are
100k-300k jpg's. The original poster said he doesn't want graphics
because he's paying a penny a kilobyte, meaning a 10-frame radar or sat
animation could cost several dollars to view, which does seem
unreasonable to me too. I feel less bandwidth constrained using wi-fi
that I leech for free wherever I can and that I can see becoming more
ubiquitous with time (on a tangent, I believe we'll have cheap wireless
TCP/IP in the cockpit as well as in the coffee shop before long). I
also feel that a picture is worth a thousand words and I'd rather see
animated radar and photos than a TAF if I had to choose between them.
The bandwidth savings gained using my app versus a web browser comes
from the fact that I avoid the overhead associated with downloading the
ADDS (or wherever) html page to query for a METAR or TAF and I avoid
the html AND a java applet (which may or may not run on my Pocket PC
anyway) to see an animation.

I've also discovered that animating the ADDS prog charts (displaying
them in timed sequence) gives an interesting "big picture" of the
weather over the next few days that I haven't seen anywhere else.

As for price, I'd charge the maximum that the market will bear. .
I'm toying with the idea of giving the application away for free, with
some limited functionality, say maybe METARs but not TAFs and still
images but not animation, and charging a license fee to add the ability
to view TAFs, RADAR and sat animation, and to stay updated as data
source locations change (or better yet, a modest regular subscription
fee to motivate me to keep links current and to keep looking for new
and interesting sources of data). As to what the fee would be exactly,
I'm not yet in a position to gauge what the market will bear. What
would you be willing to pay?

-R

thanks Gig, I was wondering about a soft button requirement. I ran the
page on an emulator site and it looked like it showed a generic "send"
button as a go button. The emulator only produced one of the dropdowns.
Dave
68 7ECA

Gig Giacona wrote:
It is an error in the page or more likey something left out. When I tried it
I too just got the drop down selection menu and no go button my
Sprint/Samsung phone did have an "accept" soft button to take the place of
the GO button.

Not long ago NOAA/NWS created a WAP site and they also left of the GO button
and there was no soft button either. I e-mailed them and they responded that
they would forward the issue to the programers. It was fixed in a day or
two. Now there is both a GO and a soft button.

I assume different phone/SW combos use a different method of selecting from
a pull down menu and it is something that the programer of the site has to
take into account.

Gig

"dave" wrote in message
...

Gig,
I tried it with my kyocera 7135, it a cell phone with a palm pilot. I can
get the page to load but all it shows me is two drop downs. I can select
different items but the page never advances to show me any result based on
my selection. I'm using the kyocera web browser. Maybe I need another
browser.
Dave
68 7ECA

Gig Giacona wrote:

"Robert M. Gary" wrote in message
egroups.com...


I'm not able to figure out what mapmx does. You send them an SMS and
they send you a METAR? I have GPRS with GSA so I can browse for METARs
on the web, but I'm paying 1cent per KByte over the cellualar network
so I'm looking for something low bandwidth.

(BTW: The wap.cupitt.com website does not work. It just tries to
download some application).



did you try the wap.cupitt.com with your cell phone? It works fine for my
Sprint phone and is about as low bandwidth as you can get.

And that's not an application it's a language, like HTML that Explorer
doesn't handle.

Gig

I forgot to mention that fly.dsc.net has metar and taf downloads.
Dave
68 7ECA

Robert M. Gary wrote:
Any opinions on the best websites for mobile users? duat.com is WAY to
expensive because of the graphics (probably 10Kbytes just to load the
title). duats.com is better but still has a lot of crap on the opening
page. Does anyone know of a good site (modeled after something like
mobile.espn.com or something?)

-Robert

"Rob" writes:

I'm not yet in a position to gauge what the market will bear. What
would you be willing to pay?

I don't have any wi-fi capability yet, but I agree it's coming
eventually to even dinosaurs like me. So, when I have wi-fi and am
considering your application, I'd pay on the order of a membership fee
in an aviation group: $30-$50 per year. I'm a 100 hour/year, VFR type
of guy who does one longish (600 nm or greater) cross-country a year
in a small 2-seater.

I'm on a Dell Axim x50v PDA with BlueTooth to my AT&T Motorola V551
internetting via GPRS (over GSM).

-Robert

Robert M. Gary wrote:
Any opinions on the best websites for mobile users? duat.com is WAY
to
expensive because of the graphics (probably 10Kbytes just to load the
title). duats.com is better but still has a lot of crap on the
opening
page. Does anyone know of a good site (modeled after something like
mobile.espn.com or something?)

-Robert

You might try http://www.palmflying.com/mobile/walocate.html this is
the mobile weather page found on PalmFLYING.com.

Have you taken a look at http://www.smartsoft.no ? They offer useeful
aviation stuff for mobile phones.



"PS" wrote in message
oups.com...

Robert M. Gary wrote:
Any opinions on the best websites for mobile users? duat.com is WAY
to
expensive because of the graphics (probably 10Kbytes just to load the
title). duats.com is better but still has a lot of crap on the
opening
page. Does anyone know of a good site (modeled after something like
mobile.espn.com or something?)

-Robert

You might try http://www.palmflying.com/mobile/walocate.html this is
the mobile weather page found on PalmFLYING.com.