Any opinions on the best websites for mobile users? duat.com is WAY to
expensive because of the graphics (probably 10Kbytes just to load the
title). duats.com is better but still has a lot of crap on the opening
page. Does anyone know of a good site (modeled after something like
mobile.espn.com or something?)

-Robert

> Any opinions on the best websites for mobile users? duat.com is WAY
to
> expensive because of the graphics (probably 10Kbytes just to load the
> title). duats.com is better but still has a lot of crap on the
opening
> page. Does anyone know of a good site (modeled after something like
> mobile.espn.com or something?)

I like Pilot MyCast. It graphically gives me everything I want when
I'm stuck at a podunk airport without computer access, including live
radar, ceilings, visibility, and forecasts. And it's only $9.95 per
month.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

"Robert M. Gary" > writes:

> Any opinions on the best websites for mobile users?

To do what exactly? If all you want is to check airport METARs and
TAFs, then I use these two free ones:

http://wap.cupitt.com
http://www.wapmx.com

But graphics are the one thing you are trying to avoid. I'm paying
around 1cent per Kbyte through ATTWS, I don't want to pay for graphics.

I'm not able to figure out what mapmx does. You send them an SMS and
they send you a METAR? I have GPRS with GSA so I can browse for METARs
on the web, but I'm paying 1cent per KByte over the cellualar network
so I'm looking for something low bandwidth.

(BTW: The wap.cupitt.com website does not work. It just tries to
download some application).

"Robert M. Gary" > wrote in message
oups.com...
> I'm not able to figure out what mapmx does. You send them an SMS and
> they send you a METAR? I have GPRS with GSA so I can browse for METARs
> on the web, but I'm paying 1cent per KByte over the cellualar network
> so I'm looking for something low bandwidth.
>
> (BTW: The wap.cupitt.com website does not work. It just tries to
> download some application).
>

did you try the wap.cupitt.com with your cell phone? It works fine for my
Sprint phone and is about as low bandwidth as you can get.

And that's not an application it's a language, like HTML that Explorer
doesn't handle.

Gig

I was a software developer in a previous life. It turned out I'm just
not cut out for sitting still and staring at a computer monitor for 40+
hours per week. These days, my day job is electronic hardware design
but I still write code when necessary for a project and as a hobby to
keep my chops from getting too rusty.

I've written a handy little app for my Pocket PC to download and
display TAFs, METARs, and RADAR from the NWS, and prog charts and
satellite images from ADDS. Anywhere there's WiFi I have textual
weather and animated graphics with less overhead in bandwidth used and
a WAY better small-screen presentation than Pocket Internet Explorer.
I used it last summer in hotel lobbies across the U. S. as I made my
way from Phoenix to the east coast and back in a Cessna 150 with a
3-day stop at Oshkosh. The trip was definitely a first for me - I'm a
200-hour private pilot, but I'll definitely do it again - hopefully in
something about 50% faster. My program worked like a charm though.

The software isn't yet commercially viable but I'm thinking it might be
worth my time to make it so. It needs better error checking. If
there's no internet available it'll just show you old data without
telling you. I'd need to fix that. Since it contains hard-coded URLs
for weather data that may be invalid one day, I was thinking of
creating an architecture whereby the app could check in with my server
for updates and download new menu items that point to interesting
sources of data. In a general sense there are probably other uses for
the basic framework of an application like that i.e. maybe stock
quotes, news, sports scores, maps, etc.

I wrote the thing over a couple of weekends early last summer. I've
used it myself for TAFs and METARs and RADAR almost every day since.

I have a very satisfying day job but I wonder if there might be some
$$$ to be made developing a product like this.

Any Pocket PC and aviation weather aficionados out there want to
motivate me to finish this thing up and make it available for sale?
Anyone wanna help out by beta-testing? Would anyone pay for this
software or maybe a small subscription fee to keep the menus current?
Would the Palm OS and/or Smart-Phone be a better platform? Have I
breached netequitte by suggesting a commercial endeavor of this sort on
r.a.p.?

Regards,

Rob

Gig,
I tried it with my kyocera 7135, it a cell phone with a palm pilot. I
can get the page to load but all it shows me is two drop downs. I can
select different items but the page never advances to show me any result
based on my selection. I'm using the kyocera web browser. Maybe I need
another browser.
Dave
68 7ECA

Gig Giacona wrote:
> "Robert M. Gary" > wrote in message
> oups.com...
>
>>I'm not able to figure out what mapmx does. You send them an SMS and
>>they send you a METAR? I have GPRS with GSA so I can browse for METARs
>>on the web, but I'm paying 1cent per KByte over the cellualar network
>>so I'm looking for something low bandwidth.
>>
>>(BTW: The wap.cupitt.com website does not work. It just tries to
>>download some application).
>>
>
>
> did you try the wap.cupitt.com with your cell phone? It works fine for my
> Sprint phone and is about as low bandwidth as you can get.
>
> And that's not an application it's a language, like HTML that Explorer
> doesn't handle.
>
> Gig
>
>

"Rob" > wrote

> Any Pocket PC and aviation weather aficionados out there want to
> motivate me to finish this thing up and make it available for sale?

How much less bandwidth than with the commercial apps? What you thinking
for a price?

> Have I
> breached netequitte by suggesting a commercial endeavor of this sort on
> r.a.p.?
>
> Regards,
>
> Rob
>
Not in my eyes. You have a helpful item in mind, to make life better for
us. As long as you are just feeling it out, OK. Once you market it, then
be sparing in your plugs, but a couple plugs are OK, IMHO.
--
Jim in NC

It is an error in the page or more likey something left out. When I tried it
I too just got the drop down selection menu and no go button my
Sprint/Samsung phone did have an "accept" soft button to take the place of
the GO button.

Not long ago NOAA/NWS created a WAP site and they also left of the GO button
and there was no soft button either. I e-mailed them and they responded that
they would forward the issue to the programers. It was fixed in a day or
two. Now there is both a GO and a soft button.

I assume different phone/SW combos use a different method of selecting from
a pull down menu and it is something that the programer of the site has to
take into account.

Gig

"dave" > wrote in message
...
> Gig,
> I tried it with my kyocera 7135, it a cell phone with a palm pilot. I can
> get the page to load but all it shows me is two drop downs. I can select
> different items but the page never advances to show me any result based on
> my selection. I'm using the kyocera web browser. Maybe I need another
> browser.
> Dave
> 68 7ECA
>
> Gig Giacona wrote:
>> "Robert M. Gary" > wrote in message
>> oups.com...
>>
>>>I'm not able to figure out what mapmx does. You send them an SMS and
>>>they send you a METAR? I have GPRS with GSA so I can browse for METARs
>>>on the web, but I'm paying 1cent per KByte over the cellualar network
>>>so I'm looking for something low bandwidth.
>>>
>>>(BTW: The wap.cupitt.com website does not work. It just tries to
>>>download some application).
>>>
>>
>>
>> did you try the wap.cupitt.com with your cell phone? It works fine for my
>> Sprint phone and is about as low bandwidth as you can get.
>>
>> And that's not an application it's a language, like HTML that Explorer
>> doesn't handle.
>>
>> Gig
>>

Jim in NC wrote:
>How much less bandwidth than with the commercial apps? What you
>thinking for a price?

TAFs and METARs are simply downloaded and displayed. They're typically
maybe a hundred bytes each, if that. My app has no real bandwidth
advantage over the web browser if you know the URL for the TAF/METAR
you want and you don't need to load some sort of a query page like ADDS
(hint: try
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/observations/metar/stations/K???.TXT,
replace ??? with a station identifier in caps). RADAR images are GIF
files that are typically 15-30k bytes each. Satellite images are
100k-300k jpg's. The original poster said he doesn't want graphics
because he's paying a penny a kilobyte, meaning a 10-frame radar or sat
animation could cost several dollars to view, which does seem
unreasonable to me too. I feel less bandwidth constrained using wi-fi
that I leech for free wherever I can and that I can see becoming more
ubiquitous with time (on a tangent, I believe we'll have cheap wireless
TCP/IP in the cockpit as well as in the coffee shop before long). I
also feel that a picture is worth a thousand words and I'd rather see
animated radar and photos than a TAF if I had to choose between them.
The bandwidth savings gained using my app versus a web browser comes
from the fact that I avoid the overhead associated with downloading the
ADDS (or wherever) html page to query for a METAR or TAF and I avoid
the html AND a java applet (which may or may not run on my Pocket PC
anyway) to see an animation.

I've also discovered that animating the ADDS prog charts (displaying
them in timed sequence) gives an interesting "big picture" of the
weather over the next few days that I haven't seen anywhere else.

As for price, I'd charge the maximum that the market will bear. :).
I'm toying with the idea of giving the application away for free, with
some limited functionality, say maybe METARs but not TAFs and still
images but not animation, and charging a license fee to add the ability
to view TAFs, RADAR and sat animation, and to stay updated as data
source locations change (or better yet, a modest regular subscription
fee to motivate me to keep links current and to keep looking for new
and interesting sources of data). As to what the fee would be exactly,
I'm not yet in a position to gauge what the market will bear. What
would you be willing to pay? :)

-R

thanks Gig, I was wondering about a soft button requirement. I ran the
page on an emulator site and it looked like it showed a generic "send"
button as a go button. The emulator only produced one of the dropdowns.
Dave
68 7ECA

Gig Giacona wrote:
> It is an error in the page or more likey something left out. When I tried it
> I too just got the drop down selection menu and no go button my
> Sprint/Samsung phone did have an "accept" soft button to take the place of
> the GO button.
>
> Not long ago NOAA/NWS created a WAP site and they also left of the GO button
> and there was no soft button either. I e-mailed them and they responded that
> they would forward the issue to the programers. It was fixed in a day or
> two. Now there is both a GO and a soft button.
>
> I assume different phone/SW combos use a different method of selecting from
> a pull down menu and it is something that the programer of the site has to
> take into account.
>
> Gig
>
> "dave" > wrote in message
> ...
>
>>Gig,
>>I tried it with my kyocera 7135, it a cell phone with a palm pilot. I can
>>get the page to load but all it shows me is two drop downs. I can select
>>different items but the page never advances to show me any result based on
>>my selection. I'm using the kyocera web browser. Maybe I need another
>>browser.
>>Dave
>>68 7ECA
>>
>>Gig Giacona wrote:
>>
>>>"Robert M. Gary" > wrote in message
oups.com...
>>>
>>>
>>>>I'm not able to figure out what mapmx does. You send them an SMS and
>>>>they send you a METAR? I have GPRS with GSA so I can browse for METARs
>>>>on the web, but I'm paying 1cent per KByte over the cellualar network
>>>>so I'm looking for something low bandwidth.
>>>>
>>>>(BTW: The wap.cupitt.com website does not work. It just tries to
>>>>download some application).
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>did you try the wap.cupitt.com with your cell phone? It works fine for my
>>>Sprint phone and is about as low bandwidth as you can get.
>>>
>>>And that's not an application it's a language, like HTML that Explorer
>>>doesn't handle.
>>>
>>>Gig
>>>
>
>

I forgot to mention that fly.dsc.net has metar and taf downloads.
Dave
68 7ECA

Robert M. Gary wrote:
> Any opinions on the best websites for mobile users? duat.com is WAY to
> expensive because of the graphics (probably 10Kbytes just to load the
> title). duats.com is better but still has a lot of crap on the opening
> page. Does anyone know of a good site (modeled after something like
> mobile.espn.com or something?)
>
> -Robert
>

"Rob" > writes:

> I'm not yet in a position to gauge what the market will bear. What
> would you be willing to pay? :)

I don't have any wi-fi capability yet, but I agree it's coming
eventually to even dinosaurs like me. So, when I have wi-fi and am
considering your application, I'd pay on the order of a membership fee
in an aviation group: $30-$50 per year. I'm a 100 hour/year, VFR type
of guy who does one longish (600 nm or greater) cross-country a year
in a small 2-seater.

I'm on a Dell Axim x50v PDA with BlueTooth to my AT&T Motorola V551
internetting via GPRS (over GSM).

-Robert

Robert M. Gary wrote:
> Any opinions on the best websites for mobile users? duat.com is WAY
to
> expensive because of the graphics (probably 10Kbytes just to load the
> title). duats.com is better but still has a lot of crap on the
opening
> page. Does anyone know of a good site (modeled after something like
> mobile.espn.com or something?)
>
> -Robert

You might try http://www.palmflying.com/mobile/walocate.html this is
the mobile weather page found on PalmFLYING.com.

Have you taken a look at http://www.smartsoft.no ? They offer useeful
aviation stuff for mobile phones.



"PS" > wrote in message
oups.com...
>
> Robert M. Gary wrote:
>> Any opinions on the best websites for mobile users? duat.com is WAY
> to
>> expensive because of the graphics (probably 10Kbytes just to load the
>> title). duats.com is better but still has a lot of crap on the
> opening
>> page. Does anyone know of a good site (modeled after something like
>> mobile.espn.com or something?)
>>
>> -Robert
>
> You might try http://www.palmflying.com/mobile/walocate.html this is
> the mobile weather page found on PalmFLYING.com.
>