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 --------------------------------------------------------
