Real-WX Frequently Asked Questions

• How often is the data updated?

  This data is updated hourly at approximately 20 minutes after the hour. The date and time of these surface observations is listed at the top of the main Real-WX page in the form YYMMDDHH (Hours are in universal time.)

  The data is updated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I'm a real slave driver and don't even give my computer any holidays off. :-)

• Your site isn't updating the weather every hour, what's going on?

  Typically, my site is very reliable. There are couple of things you should try first on your end.

  Manually Reload: Your browser might be caching an older version of the data. Hold down the shift key and click reload when viewing the page in question.

  Clear the Cache: Older versions of netscape had caching bugs and wouldn't reload even when you told it to reload. Clear your netscape cache (both memory and disk) then reload.

  Is My Data Source Down? Ok, I'm not always perfect, neither is the internet, nor are the computers all of this runs on. There could be a problem on my end. If that seems to be the case, please send me some email and let me know: . But first, please read through these FAQ's to see if the answer is here.

  Emergency Fallback Data: If my weather source is hosed, I'm not around to fix it, and you need real weather now, you can try the fallback data set. It is just the data from my old weather page presented in the new format. It has fewer cities, is less complete, and has less accurate info ... but it might be just enough to give you that real weather buzz you so desperately crave. :-)

  Excuses, Excuses: If you have no luck and nothing works, click here to see my excuse.

• Why is data for my favorite station sometimes missing?

  I am at the mercy of my data feed (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Atmospheric Sciences.) I only get the data they send, and often times it is missing various stations. I have been thinking about how I can save recent data for stations that drop out temporarily, but I haven't had time to really dig in and look at how I want to do it.

• What format is the time stamp on the data?

  The times stamps on all the data is in Universal (Zulu) time. For me in Minnesota, USA, that means I have to subtract 5 or 6 hours depending on whether we are in daylight savings time or not.

X-Plane & Real-WX Related Questions

• Welcome X-Plane Users!

  If you have a question you'd like to see answered here, please let me know.

MSFS & Real-WX Related Questions

• How do I setup more than one weather area with real-wx, such as departure and destination?

  I'm sorry, but this is beyond the capabilities of the real-wx.exe program. It can only setup a single global MSFS weather area. If you'd like to set up more than one area, I suggest you have a look at the wetter 6 program or wxadv with FSFS.

• I have a problem or a question about the wxadv program. Help!

  I am not the author of the wxadv program. I do maintain the real weather web page. I did write the station report decoding routines. I am the author of real-wx, but I am not the author of wxadv. :-)

  The one and true author of wxadv is Jeff Wheeler j4cwheel@ix.netcom.com. I can help with some things, but most wxadv questions should be directed to him.

• Why do I get general protection faults and other crashes with wxadv2?

  Copy and paste the stations you wish to fly through into A NEW FILE which should then be named ALL.RWX. The problem for many stems from renaming the entire downloaded United States rwx as ALL.RWX.

  This problem is caused by some known bugs in the weather report decoding routines I have written. This causes the wxadv program (which uses this routines) to crash on certain individual reports. If you can limit or vary your station list to avoid the problem stations, or try again next hour when new reports come in, you can often get it to work. I have updated the decode routines to work much more robustly and reliably, but Jeff hasn't had time to incorperate these into his program. It is on his todo list, but he has been very busy lately.