NetHeads,
It was gloomy all day in Huntsville, raining just enough to put a damper on
things. I needed to reactivate my XMWX weather subscription, which I placed on
hold in October of 2008 after the Corvair College at Ed Fisher's place near
Columbia, SC. I never saw the point in reactivating it in 2009, since I spent
much of the flying season in England, missing SNF for the first time in many
years. Now that Corvair College #17 is nearing, along with all the other stuff
I want to fly to this year, I called and paid up for re-activation. I was
pleasantly surprised that they let me slide without the $75 activation fee,
despite the more-than-a-year lapse. The reactivation process means you have to
set your XM receiver to look for the signal, which requires the airplane to
have a view of the southern sky within a few minutes of reactivation on the
web.
I only had an hour before sunset, but there were tiny patches of blue and when
I told my wife I wasn't sure if I was going flying or not, she said "are you
sure dear? It looks hopeful out there... you should give it a try". I have to
wonder if life insurance was foremost in her mind, but still wasted no time
heading to the airport to get the ultimate view of the southern sky. If
insurance is all it takes, sign me up!
Sure 'nuff, the breaking clouds yielded the perfect sunset conditions, and the
wife kicked off the online activation process by request from my cellphone,
engine running and oil temp coming up. Before I got to the runway (30 seconds
later), the XMWX was downloading weather information. By takeoff time a couple
of minutes later, rain was showing up to the southeast on the laptop, and a few
more minutes after that the cloud information was displayed.
See http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/sunsets/100310151sm.jpg for the sunset,
http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/xm/100310203m.jpg for a view of the APIC
Approach display with weather overlay, and http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/xm/
for a bit of a description of the XMWX weather system, which was conceived in
Huntsville by our local weatherman, Bob Baron. Ain't technology wonderful?
Personal time machines are good too...
Mark Langford
N56ML "at" hiwaay.net
website at http://www.N56ML.com
