Finners wrote:
At the risk of asking the obvious, what happens if you are on 3G/4G at home?
I’ll give it a try.
I’d be really amazed if SD was trying to parse HTML. I can’t imagine anyone tries that with a commercial product.
That’s what everybody has to do, unless they pay €xxxx/year to Eurocontrol for their B2B data feed which comes over a VPN and that is machine readable, etc.
Obviously a smarter implementation would be to do this dirty work on your own server and make the mobile app use that, because then
I have a private wx site which does exactly that.
Iridium satphone products (e.g. ADL120, MLX770, etc) have to do exactly this too because Iridium is far too slow to just go to the ADDS website and download the whole page. Actually I reckon they use UDP. I was involved in a project years ago which did that.
One drawback is that if that server breaks, all the thousands of apps in the field stop working.
There should be zero downloading of HTML or other “pages” by SkyDemon if it is implemented half decently.
Simply use the NOAA XML service, and then ignore any XML messages that don’t parse correctly (or don’t validate against the schema).
This is probably what they are doing already – but are then generating an overly intrusive user notification in the event of a parsing error.
Peter wrote:
That’s what everybody has to do, unless they pay €xxxx/year to Eurocontrol for their B2B data feed which comes over a VPN and that is machine readable, etc.
That’s technically incorrect on quite many levels…
Eurocontrol to the best of my knowledge doesn’t do weather. While their B2B is encrypted (think https), it isn’t over a VPN. And it doesn’t even cost €xxxx/year; the only thing that costs is the required AFTN address that’s needed if you want to file via B2B.
Weather (METAR, TAF, WAFC charts, etc) are distributed over SAtellite DIStribution; despite the name, it’s available via some form of secure ftp. SADIS is operated by the UK metoffice, and the operational cost is paid by countries according to their number of CAT flights. One can get access to SADIS if the meteorological office of one’s country endorses it. The UK Metoffice seems quite supportive. Meteoswiss unfortunately isn’t, they flat out refuse to endorse, they much rather try to sell their own commercial service. Switzerland paid roughly 10k pound in 2015 for the whole SADIS access; Meteoswiss’ prices are in the same order of magnitude for one user.
It was correct when one of their customers described it to me, maybe 3 years ago.
Maybe he was pulling my leg?
Eurocontrol were obviously not “doing weather”. The data comes from the various airports (METARs) and the national Met offices (TAFs).
Peter wrote:
It’s not obvious how one would detect this, however.
It’s quite easy – just don’t display anything until the complete HTTP request has finished. No checksum required (it’s redundant, IP already has checksums). HTTP is over a TCP socket stream, so you can know for sure when it has completed (graceful connection close) versus when it’s died (Connection reset by peer). HTTP also has a Content-Length: header in the response so you know how much data you should get. Timeouts can take care of the situation where connections become impractically slow.
Holy charts Batman, thread resurrection time…
Figured out my hotspot feature on my £89 Microsoft phone and with the savings on an iPhone plus invested in the bad elf lightning connector for the iPad mini (wifi only). I needed the hotspot for amending Rocket Route flight plans in the cockpit and will file on RR, which I use on the day job.
The bad elf is for improved situational awareness in the Super Cub, although am a dedicated paper chart deduced reckoning, school trig clock code practitioner, having the feature is an enhancement.
I am defaulting on Sky Demon for VFR and wanted to check how good it was and whether users are happy with their subscription service. Alternatively is RR OK for VFR? I see you need a subscription to get a moving map with Sky Demon.
RR & SS are very different types of products. They cater for totally different markets.
What exactly are you trying to get? Flight plan creation and filing or moving maps? IFR or VFR?
DP just looking for an update on SkyDemon users for VFR purposes. Having dug in to RR which is my IFR day job software I see it only has IFR moving map.
SD seems to be well thought through for VFR purposes, with an INAV and profile view similar to expensive glass.
Ideally feedback from European users that SD paid service has good map coverage in Europe.
Also any bad elf lightning connector iPad mini SD users, whether they are happy with the set up.
