WAPMet - Free decoded METAR aviation weather reports direct to you WAP enabled device

*WAPMet has been upgraded! Old search URL's are invalid*

WAPMet - Aviation METAR weather service for WAP.

Introduction

WAPMet is a free METAR decoding service for WAP enabled devices. Using your mobile phone (or any other WAP enabled mobile device) you can enter the 4 digit ICAO code or part of the name, for any airport or reporting station world-wide and recieve the latest METAR weather report. WAPMet doesn't just give you the METAR report, it also gives you a "human readable" version saving you the need to decode the METAR yourself.

WAPMet is FREE, can be viewed from anywhere in the world, is available 24hrs a day (subject to the server crashing) and from any WAP gateway.

WAPMet is developed in my freetime and is hosted on my own server. All costs incurred I absorb myself but if you use WAPMet regularly and would like to make a small contribution towards its development and upkeep, you are very welcome to make a small donation. All donations are greatfully recieved.

Latest News

2003-10-20: Apologies for WAPMet not being fully functional for the past couple of weeks. I've been ill and hadn't had time to look into the errors that some where reporting with the reports. It turns out my new host likes to randomly change file permissions on files (lord knows why) and this was causing corrupt output. Its fixed now and you shouldn't have any more problems. Thanks for your patience.

2003-09-23: *UPDATE YOUR BOOKMARKS* I've moved WAPMet to a new server and have decided to stop using the speedfreak.com domain. It is now part of my wunderboy.org site and the URL has changed. You can now accesss WAPMet via http://www.wunderboy.org/wapmet/

2003-06-21: We're back! I've just spent the last 20hrs re-writing the entire WAPMet code from scratch, adding some performance tweaks and a bit more usability (at least from my point of view). I've also upgraded the server that WAPMet is running on - I now have twice the memory and 4 times the processing power! Sadly, because of peering problems with NOAA some searches may take a little time - you cant have it all.

Please note that if you bookmarked or were linking directly to the search script IT HAS BEEN REMOVED. Old URL's are now invalid and you will need to search via the homepage at http://www.wunderboy.org/wapmet/.

Thank you for being patient over the past 2 weeks while the upgrade has been taking place, I hope this and future developments wont dissapoint.

2003-06-20: *IMPORTANT* I've noticed from the logs that several sites/servers appear to be using WAPMet as a datafeed for their own WAP Metar services. This is NOT allowed! Some people have been making requests for METAR information for some airports every 3 minutes 24/7! Apart from the waste of bandwidth and strain on the server, I don't like my free service being hijacked for commerical reasons. Also keep in mind that every request that is made forces my server to peer to my data provider to fetch the METAR, so its not just my bandwidth and resources your wasting.

When WAPMet returns after the upgrade, I have implemented a numer of features to stop abuse of the system, however any servers/ip's I discover making excessive requests to the service will be blacklisted and prevented from using it.

2003-06-19: WAPMet is currently off-line for some much needed maintenance! The server hardware that WAPMet runs on was in desperate need of an upgrade and some of the METAR processing scripts are being optimised and re-written. Please bear with me while I work to improve things.

2003-05-17: 3 years WAPMet has been running and 3 years without any bugs or changes! Yes, its been rather too long since I did anything with the site but, as WAPMet was not a business venture but just a learning excercise there hasn't been much to do. However, dispite hating the old design, some new WAPMet experiments are on the way so as I may soon release new features I should update the site. Stay tuned!

2000-06-11: Its here! You can now search by airport name on WAPMet. Sorry its taken so long, I'm been all over Europe these past couple of weeks and away from my computer. WARNING The search is a little slow - I'm in the process of building a new, faster server for WAPMet but until then a search can take up to 30 seconds.

2000-05-23: Good news, the "Search by Name" function is almost done. Soon you will be able to enter all or part of an airport name and be present with a list of matches. Click those and you will get its latest report. Other news, I'm getting a new faster server for WAPMet which should make the searches a lot faster and stop a lot of problems I've had so far.

2000-05-18: Bugs fixed! Thanks for those of you (oddly enough in Australia!) who told me they had problems getting past the start page. It turned out to be a bogus tag that was causing the problem. Seems some early 7110's ignore it, but not the newer ones. That bug has now been fixed. I've also altered the re-direction script so people using the WAPMet URL should get the right page.

Why use WAPMet?

Well I can't answer that for you! Obviously you cannot use WAPMet when airborne as it is illegal to use a mobile phone in flight (plus they dont work well for technical reasons). Maybe that will change when the new systems come out - I really dont know.

However, I envisaged that WAPMet may be useful for checking weather on-route if your leaving from a small airstrip with no communication or if your on your way to your airfield and need to check if your going to be delayed or unable to fly at all because of bad weather.

WAPMet was originally designed as an exercise, not to be a commercial venture or raving sucess. If you find it useful then great - if not then it is a sucessful exercise on what you can do with WAP.

How to use WAPMet

First of all, this only covers the site/service itself. I'm not giving support on how to configure or use your mobile phone or PDA. Check the documentation or manufacturers web site if you need to know how to get your WAP device connected to the net and viewing pages.

The site itself is simple. To access the WAPMet site, point you WAP device to http://www.wunderboy.org/wapmet/index.wml. Once your connected, you'll see the WAPMet welcome screen.
Once your on the site you'll have the option to read about the site, the disclaimer (PLEASE READ THIS) and to read a METAR report. You will be presented with options to search by ICAO code or airport name. You must enter 4 letters for and ICAO code or between 4 - 16 characters for airport names.

PLEASE NOTE! With name searches, it checks against names in the NWS database, hence any character other than A-Z is not valid. This means nothing like Å,Ä or Ö will not match, use A or O instead. Also, please note that you have to use the official name; for example Cheltenham and Gloucester Airport, UK is actually listed in the NWS database as Staverton Private.

Name searches will only return up to a maximum of 8 matches and can currently take up to 30 seconds to complete. This is being addressed.

If you want some sample ICAO codes to try the site with, I used these during testing:
EGLL - Heathrow Airport, London, UK.
EGSS - Stansted Airport, London, UK.
EGCK - Gatwick Airport, London, UK.
EGBJ - Cheltenham/Gloucester Airport, Gloucestershire, UK.
ESSA - Arlanda Airport, Stockholm, Sweden.
ESSB - Bromma Airport, Stockholm, Sweden.
KJFK - John F. Kennedy Airport, New York, USA.

DISCLAIMER. The information is only as accurate and up-to-date as that held at NOAA at the time of request. Hence, if NOAA haven't had an update for a while, the METAR may be inacurate. When you get the report, you'll be presented with the date and time of the report and the current date and time in UTC format. This is so you can see how old the METAR report is.

How it works

First of all, if you dont know what WAP is, you probably shouldn't be here! ;o) But if your still curious, take a look at this article from the BBC for a description.

WAPMet works by taking the ICAO code you entered and then pulling the most recent METAR weather report from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). It then decodes it, adds a few pieces of extra information (like the current UTC time so you can see how old the report is). The data is then formatted into a WML page and sent to the WAP device via your gateway.

WAPMet also has its only database of METAR reporting stations with not only ICAO codes and names, but state, country postion in D-M-S and also in decimal format.

No WAP browser?

Most current mobile phones have WAP capabilities, but there are a number of ways to view this site using "virtual" devices. Below is a list of WAP emulators - software that acts like a WAP browser so you can try the site out. Here are some of the ones I use:

gelon.net - Web based emulators for several mobile phones.
WinWap - A downloadable WAP emulator development kit.
TT Emulator - A web based WAP emulator.

What does the future hold for WAPMet?

As long as people use the site and find it useful I will try to maintain and update it. It was however just an experiment during my period as a WAP developer and therefore not intended to have this much longevity

I have considered adding TAF and NOTAM information but that depends on how easily I can get the info plus the fact there is a LOT of text information to show on such a small screen! At present the data is proving very hard to obtain.

WAPMet will expand if I know people are using it and based on feedback from its users. The more you tell me what you think about the service, the better I can make it. There is currently a Flash based version in development for Pocket PC's and PDA's.

Frequently Asked Questions

Below are some questions I have been asked a lot during the development of WAPMet.

Q: Why did you create WAPMet?
A: I created WAPMet out of my personal interest in aviation and the need of a project to help me learn about WAP and WML.

Q: What did you use to create WAPMet? What is it written in?
A: WAPMet is written in standard WML 1.1 and the decoding engine is written in PHP. This is a total re-write of the WAPMet 1 engine which was written in Perl. Most of the WML and PHP was written in EditPlus and the graphic converted to WBMP format with the Nokia WAP Toolkit.

A lot of redevelopment is going on right now to make the site fast still and I'm working on a Flash version for Pocket PC's and PDA's.

Q: What did you use to test WAPMet?
A: It was tested using a couple of emulators and a real Nokia 7110 phone. Although I made the layout fairly generic, there are some slight tweaks used to make it work better with that device.

Q: How long did it take you to write?
A: I started on March 3rd, 2000 and the initial decoding script took about 4 hours to write. After that was a lot of tweaking and refining which took about 20 hours. The site actually first went live on 12 March, 2000 in its most basic working form.

The latest upgrade took another 20 or so hours and was a re-write and optimisation of the original code into PHP. A new engine is being developed in C++ but wont be ready for quite a while.

Q: Can I have a copy of your source code?
A: No, sorry. I've had a lot of people ask that and I've had commercial interest in the site. The weather data I use is free and available from many places so I want this site to be free. I dont want my code being used in a commercial venture where a fee is charged for data that contributes to the saftey of aviation.

Contact me

If you have any questions, problems or suggestions for WAPMet please do e-mail me. I'd love to know who is using it and what for.

If your a journalist or writer for an aviation or IT magazine please do contact me for more information or comment. I would like to see as many people as possible made aware of WAPMet.