Related Vis Problem only w/no METAR?

Hi Damian,This may be related to the other problem some of the fellows have related about visibility issues, so you might want to just peruse this and give one overall answer to everyone rather than doing individual posts.Anyway, I loaded up my flight at an airport this morning. I have been using offline weather, and so selected the latest METAR time for this region (09:00 PST, 17:00 GMT). Unfortunately, this isn't exactly a huge airport (can you say, "Bella Bella International Airport :-lol!!), and the METAR came up blank. Basically it said it was processing the information in the space where the METAR's are supposed to be, but the header line at the top said that the information had been read in. In any event, there was no METAR at all showing. However, my vis dropped to that of a myopic bat, and if I dropped my keys on the ramp, I would've lost them :-). I checked the Weather in FS2002's advanced page and there were no clouds showing, but vis was down to 1/8th. NOW, what I did next was pick up the online weather (switched options to online) and voila, I had a station right next door (that I didn't know about before), and the weather loaded up just fine, and was correct.OK, so 2 questions here:1) Are offline and online stations not the same? If they aren't, I probably want to fly online most of the time.2) Why would the nearest station not come up if flying offline? It did try to pick 2 relatively nearby stations (CYBD and one other, which I forget), but received no METAR's for either.If you want to try this out yourself, go to the Bella Bella (Denny's Island) airport (watch out for that 747 that keeps doing circuits there :-) ), which is up the coast of British Columbia, Canada. The time I selected was 09:00 PST on Sunday, Jan 19 as mentioned.Thanks Damian, appreciate your efforts.Glenn