It looks like the paid service continues
Of course there are many alternatives these days but I have not seen the following anywhere else (recently)
I pay for the middle one – £40.32 – because radar is available freely from various sites like Meteox.
A great pity and I am not sure that I fully understand why they are doing this. Yes, there must have been a cost involved and yes, all small businesses are having a tough time but…:(
I supported Avbrief for a long long time but regret it became redundant when Skydemon came along.
Greatest respect for Peter Mundy but the same applied to Navbox.
A great pity and I am not sure that I fully understand why they are doing this. Yes, there must have been a cost involved and yes, all small businesses are having a tough time but…:(
I would speculate that they are on a hosting package of X TB/month and there were so many people bottom feeding from their free service that it pushed them into a higher billing bracket.
The problem in GA is that everybody wants everything for free. And one can indeed get almost everything for free. This has led to everybody who can write a bit of PHP and HTML (which is basically anybody with an Open University Masters (Hons.) in Computer Science ) knocking up a free weather website, which bottom feeds off somebody else’s free weather website 
And Avbrief’s website serves the best quality data because they get it via a VPN from Eurocontrol’s paid-for B2B quality-assured service.
The ADDS site, which is used by practically all the free wx websites (well, those who don’t get the stuff off another free weather website which gets it from ADDS ) serves an HTML page, and every so often the font specs etc changes, and it breaks it, till somebody notices and fixes it. We must be grateful to America for doing so much to reduce the cost of flying in Europe but sometimes things do break…
I supported Avbrief for a long long time but regret it became redundant when Skydemon came along.
Where does Skydemon get it from? Do they get it from ADDS, or via Eurocontrol’s VPN?
Also you can’t run SD on say a little phone, like you can run countless wx websites.
SD now available on IPhone and Android as far as I am aware.
Edit. In fact I am certain!
I´ve been using Avbrief (free) since 2000 but now currently the only benefit it offer is history – you can nicely see trend in the last 2-3 hours. Does everybody knows what the difference between ADDS and Eurocontrol data ? I was researching this question years ago, but did´t get anywhere…
a bit of PHP writing is at www.orlita.net/m summary of METARs for places of interest. Inspired by mymetar.com which ceased to exist few years ago
souce PHP available on request – but please keep in mind it was not written by someone having a degree in computer science, but aircraft design ;-)
