[aprssig] Snow and Visibility on APRS

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Wed, 18 Aug 2010, Max Harper wrote:

> Something that has been on my wishlist for some time now is a "It's 
> Raining Now" flag. All the  rainfall fields are after the fact, or how 
> much it HAS rained. I'd also like to see a "Rate of  Rainfall" field. In 
> a heavy rain the console of my Davis Vantage Pro2 wil say "It's rainging 
> Cats  and Dogs" so I know the data is in there. Just need a field to put 
> it in and a software update  from Davis to output it to APRS. Thinking 
> about it more, if there was just a "Rate of Rainfall"  field then 
> anything above 0 (zero) would mean it's raining now.   Max KG4PID  

I suppose that would be duplicate data from the other counters, and would 
unnecessary grow the packets. The "raining now" status can be derived from 
two sequential packets - if the "amount of rain since X" counters are 
getting incremented, it is raining now. It's straightforward to improve 
the receiving software to do this calculation, and it'll work for all the 
existing weather stations which don't send such a preprocessed value.

I guess i'll simply have to add "raining now" or "rate of rain" display in 
aprs.fi weather indications, it's simple to do and quite useful.

Thanks for the inspiration!

   - Hessu