And here is Peter’s feature to find weather around a specific airport (which does need to have METAR/TAF itself, only resolve in our database).
There is also a great windoze app for Telegram, which I am using now. It echoes everything to/from the phone app so you can run the two at the same time. So you can use the PC app (with your nice keyboard etc) and when you go to the toilet you take the phone with you in the sure knowledge you won’t miss anything 
Well, since we have “NEAR EGTF”, how about “ROUTE EGTF LFLI” ?
Fantastic. Thanks !
chrisparker wrote:
Well, since we have “NEAR EGTF”, how about “ROUTE EGTF LFLI” ?
What do you have in mind? The METAR/TAF along the route or IFR route generation? The route weather can be a lot of data, hundreds of stations. Route generation very much depends on input parameters, such as aircraft — you know all the options there are in the web interface! Also it would mean we have to do it in a multi-threaded fashion as it’s a long running command. All doable but I have to first better understand the use case. At the moment the bot is completely stateless.
achimha wrote:
Sometimes you’re at a remote place where mobile internet is either not available or slow or very expensive. Therefore we have created an SMS gateway offering the most important features of autorouter for quick access. The phone number is +4915792340092 which you should add to your phone address book. Note that it will only talk to you if you communicate with the phone that is registered in your user account.
I’ve tried it (twice) and can’t make it work. I’ve sent “WX ESSA” to the number you quoted and I get no reply. I do use the phone with the number given in my autorouter account.
SMS is working for me. I suppose there is some sort of filtering on your end that kicks out the message as spam.
I tried the SMS gateway and it’s not working for me either (from NL, +31).
I’m pretty certain that there is no filtering in place on my side. I do send SMS to a lot of foreign numbers without problems.
The Telegram bot is working fine.
It worked for me this evening, but unfortunately the problem with good old SMS is that it works only when it works…
There are many reasons why an SMS may not be delivered or why a particular phone may not get any SMS messages for a time. The explanations are complicated and are to do with the way the cellular system maintains multiple databases of where each subscriber is, and these need to be synchronised, and the sync can easily fall apart especially if you move through areas where the signal is marginal. One solution is to reboot the phone which forces a re-sync; here in the UK it is fairly normal to then receive several days’ worth of messages.
Is there really spam filtering on SMS? In Europe, it costs too much to send the messages so few will bother. Especially from a number which is not actually sending out many messages anyway.
At work, we make a product which transmits SMS messages on various conditions and I have one set up to send me one every day at 9am. It’s on Vodafone too. Did I get one today? What do you think?
I am impressed with Whatsapp and Telegram. I would prefer Telegram because after WA has been bought by Facebook, FB now has the mobile number of every WA customer. And sure enough at the end of the A-Z Contacts list in WA I see a second list of people, known to me, whose appearance is slightly mysterious…
achimha wrote:
I suppose there is some sort of filtering on your end that kicks out the message as spam.
Filtering of SMS?? I’ve never heard of such a thing!
