Non Canscope Euroscope and Weather radar

[Mark Wolpert]

Interesting post here on the Vatsim website that provides weather radar in Euroscope.
 
https://forums.vatsim.net/topic/16253-weather-radar-possible/?tab=comments#comment-106816


I am not sure if this would work with Canscope as it requires the TopSky plugin which I find has some weird anomolies when used in Canscope.  It kind of leads to me another question, are there VatCan controllers that use native Euroscope without the Canscope plugin ?

[Travis Chan]

If there is a way to integrate weather that would be amazing. I've been playing around with hoppie lately to get offer CPDLC services on Oceanic. This wouldn't be too much of a stretch to add to my CZYZ controlling.

[Mark Wolpert]

Weather radar and CPDLC can both be done via the TopSky plug in available here:

https://vatsim-scandinavia.org/forums/topic/3048-topsky-plugin-221-beta-10/

I have added it to my Euroscope/Canscope but I found i could not get it working properly and it added extra things to the scope that I was not happy with.  If someone can figure out the right setting and usage this would be a good thing to add.

[Alexandre Dufresne]

It is indeed an interesting plugin, I've contacted Juha from Vatsim Scandinavia to seek some help regarding this. In short, I've asked if all features but the wx radar could be turned off or if the wx radar could be separated in another plugin by itself. Here's his answer:

it is not possible to use just specific parts of the plugin such as the wx radar display, the code just hasn't been written with that kind of modularity in mind.

The code that makes the weather stuff work (control variables, internet connectivity, reading the downloaded image file, converting the projection into the one used by EuroScope and then finally drawing the data onto the screen) is also spread across various source files so it's not a simple task to separate it from the other code. It's possible of course, just so time-consuming that I couldn't give an honest estimate of when I'd get around to looking at it.

[Mark Walsh]

As some strive to be close to the real thing, I don't believe that NavCanada uses this type of environment.

[Kolby Dunning]

Even though it isn't realistic to NavCanada, they do have access to a lot more tools for accurate weather predicting, so we are also looking into TopSky for it's weather reporting, as it will allow for our controllers to predict deviations better, as well as vectoring around systems as required.

[Ron Yan]

It is indeed an interesting plugin, I've contacted Juha from Vatsim Scandinavia to seek some help regarding this. In short, I've asked if all features but the wx radar could be turned off or if the wx radar could be separated in another plugin by itself. Here's his answer:

it is not possible to use just specific parts of the plugin such as the wx radar display, the code just hasn't been written with that kind of modularity in mind.

The code that makes the weather stuff work (control variables, internet connectivity, reading the downloaded image file, converting the projection into the one used by EuroScope and then finally drawing the data onto the screen) is also spread across various source files so it's not a simple task to separate it from the other code. It's possible of course, just so time-consuming that I couldn't give an honest estimate of when I'd get around to looking at it.

They do share their methodology here (https://vatsim-scandinavia.org/forums/topic/2277-plugin-updates/page/4/) which is quite clever, could be duplicated I think. However, I think only worth replicating what CAATS actually depicts.

Even though it isn't realistic to NavCanada, they do have access to a lot more tools for accurate weather predicting, so we are also looking into TopSky for it's weather reporting, as it will allow for our controllers to predict deviations better, as well as vectoring around systems as required.

As some strive to be close to the real thing, I don't believe that NavCanada uses this type of environment.

If anyone has reference images of how the CAATS display depicting weather, I can assess the feasibility of implementing it in ES

[Ron Yan]

it's definitely feasible 

[Kolby Dunning]

Man that looks nice