Tim Vasquez
EF5
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2003
- Messages
- 3,411
For those of you who are old-timers, how did you get weather data in pre-Internet days, not counting The Weather Channel?
I recall back around 1983 a couple of times I found Flight Service Station or AF weather station numbers and got them to read me SAO reports for specific stations. Around the sixth station they'd ask "who is this", but I had enough to construct some of my first analysis charts.
Around 1984 I got a 300-baud modem and discovered CompuServe, which of course had a ton of data from the FAA 604 feed, so from then on getting hard weather data was not a problem. What was a problem, however, was the expense. Their aviation weather area ran a surcharge of like 15 cents a minute, so you could quickly end up with hefty bills if you weren't careful.
In 1988 an FAA IVRS system came online and you could dial in with a free call and use the touch tone to bring up any station you wanted and do a map that way. The problem here was that not all of the observational elements were included, and of course the upper air data was just a rehash of the AVN reanalysis data, which proved useless for skew T's.
Around 1987 WFAA went digital and Troy Dungan actually gave me their old fax machine. I managed to hook that up to my HF receiver and I was regularly able to bring in a naval weather station in Norfolk and the AFGWC broadcast in Omaha (which was very weak but had DIFAX). I don't recall forecasting from chases because there was NO reception in the morning due to the loss of nocturnal HF propagation, but I usually had the NGM run the night before, which was awesome.
Anyhow things were definitely different back in the old days. Sometime in 1995 I remember signing up with GEnie and doing a gopher:// command into a weather website somewhere, and never looked back, and sometime after that I found out about this new thing called an ISP.
Tim
I recall back around 1983 a couple of times I found Flight Service Station or AF weather station numbers and got them to read me SAO reports for specific stations. Around the sixth station they'd ask "who is this", but I had enough to construct some of my first analysis charts.
Around 1984 I got a 300-baud modem and discovered CompuServe, which of course had a ton of data from the FAA 604 feed, so from then on getting hard weather data was not a problem. What was a problem, however, was the expense. Their aviation weather area ran a surcharge of like 15 cents a minute, so you could quickly end up with hefty bills if you weren't careful.
In 1988 an FAA IVRS system came online and you could dial in with a free call and use the touch tone to bring up any station you wanted and do a map that way. The problem here was that not all of the observational elements were included, and of course the upper air data was just a rehash of the AVN reanalysis data, which proved useless for skew T's.
Around 1987 WFAA went digital and Troy Dungan actually gave me their old fax machine. I managed to hook that up to my HF receiver and I was regularly able to bring in a naval weather station in Norfolk and the AFGWC broadcast in Omaha (which was very weak but had DIFAX). I don't recall forecasting from chases because there was NO reception in the morning due to the loss of nocturnal HF propagation, but I usually had the NGM run the night before, which was awesome.
Anyhow things were definitely different back in the old days. Sometime in 1995 I remember signing up with GEnie and doing a gopher:// command into a weather website somewhere, and never looked back, and sometime after that I found out about this new thing called an ISP.
Tim