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AviatorsBot - A Telegram Bot for Weather Updates and Calculations

You can receive a message whenever a new METAR or TAF is published, perform calculations of density altitude and cross wind without having to input any additional information about the airfield and all of it with a comfortable interface.

On Telegram: AviatorsBot
More info: aviatorsbot.com

I love using the autorouter bot, but my favorite feature – the METAR and TAF subscriptions – has a somewhat clumsy interface and was clearly not the main focus. I have written this bot with the focus on subscriptions and easy management of those subscriptions.

Based upon my experience, with a little luck, you can also receive messages in flight using Telegram. Which has more reliable message delivery than normal Apps. You will also have all the METARs and TAFs you looked at available offline, have proof that you checked the weather and I use it to watch the weather a couple of hours before going flying or when I am out an about with the plane for a couple of days and want to keep track of all the weather changes.

Some examples what you can do:
add loww lowg ljpz … subscribe to those stations
ls … list all subscriptions
rm … remove all subscriptions
add 1300 eddm .. subscribe to eddm until 13:00Z
da loav … calculate the density altitude, using the altimeter setting of the nearest airfield, since the METAR doesn’t have a QNH.
xwind loww … calculate the cross and head wind for all runways, no further input necessary!

I hope you’ll also find it useful! The project is completely free and open source.

Fly for your dreams
LOAV

Servus Fabian,
Danke – great stuff!

always learning
LO__, Austria

Cool app Fabian.
Well done and thanks for sharing with us !

ES?? - Sweden

This looks very good Fabian.

A few points:

  • how often is the wx for “subscribed” stations delivered? (a GREAT feature BTW especially for using 3G/4G when airborne, with intermittent signal)
  • the xwind is always going to be the same for a given runway so that e.g. 08/26 is the same figure always, no?
  • where do the tafs and metars come from? ADDS?
Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

@Peter Thank you!

To answer your points:

  • Currently the ADDS server is polled every 3 minutes, I thought about increasing it but even after research could not tell if there is a specific abuse limit on the ADDS server.
  • Yes, its just so that you can easily see at a quick glance which runway is the best one and where the xwind is coming from, in the case of no tailwind for example, I am also still thinking about sorting it by the strongest headwind so that you would have to best runways at the top.
  • Yes they are taken from the ADDS Text Server, where they are already decoded into XML format, which I am using for the crosswind (which btw. also supports varying and gusting winds) and for the density altitude.

There have also been a couple of small improvements in the last days based upon feedback and things which I have noticed.

Fly for your dreams
LOAV

I flew today LDLO-EGKA and was testing the periodic updated taf/metar feature. It is really brilliant. On that flight one gets connectivity only very sporadically and this method takes advantage of it quite well.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

This is great, thank you very much for bringing it to our attention @fabian

At first I couldn’t see the added value compared to an app like Aeroweather (which is very good, too) → but having tried AviatorsBot on Telegram, I really love the option to subscribe to one – or even several – station(s) and then receive automatic METAR/TAF updates. I look forward to testing that in flight. Really useful!

(DA and Xwind are good too, but I can get those on Aeroweather)

Bordeaux

Thank you for the feedback!

I’ve also made a couple of small improvements since the bot is online and keep working on it, so if there are any specific features you miss or think would be great let me know and I’ll look into it :-)

Fly for your dreams
LOAV

Could the bot somehow feature weather radar from austrocontrol? And other charts?

Really a great tool you made, thanks! I have also replied to the private message with my email!

always learning
LO__, Austria

The /xwind behaves a bit strange when it reports cross-wind for airports with parallell runways.
For an airport with the runways 12L/30R 12R/30L cross-wind is reported for runway 12/30 and the “imaginary” runway 13/31.

ESTL
47 Posts
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