just talked with someone with the local airport weather station and was told their setup is "locked" to 10 miles visibility and no more because 10 miles is enough for VFR flying so the actual visibility could be more. he said he has seen 100+ miles before. my problem was with getting 50 miles vis. no matter the conditions. got it yesterday in pouring down rain. called MS but didn't get much help. he did try though. i did get 10 miles vis at 5:00am this morning but not now. i'm in the charleston, s.c. area and am wondering if anyone near here or anywhere for that matter is getting the same thing. could it be there's a glitch in one of the reporting stations? just trying to get some feedback here. maybe i should use the user defined weather and set the conditions accordingly. or is it possible the vis. IS 50 miles. william

When you say it was pouring down rain, was that what you observed outside? At the same time, what were the weather conditions provided by the flight simulator.One of the misconceptions about the flight simulator's weather is that it will change every 15min. That is not necessarily true. Generally, the weather information is updated to the Government database each hour. There are special updates during high weather activity but it is not guarrantied that an intermediate update will be issued.I recommend you visit http://aviationweather.gov/ . You should find more than enough data on weather and how it is reported. Click on the Metars selection, input your favorite airport and have it provide the raw and translated data. If you use the down-arrow box (most recent only) and select several hours of data, you can see the changes and the times that the reports were made.W. Sieffert

It is often useful to clear your internet explorer cache as well, for some reason some files from MS/Jeppesson's real weather get stored there, and old data can confuse FS...In MSIE, tools menu, Internet options, In the middle of that window - temporary internet files, click the "delete files" button...best,sg

ASOS and AWOS stations will report visibility if it's 10 miles or less. Some older type stations will just say "visibility 10 miles" while some say "visibility greater than 10 miles." I'm talking about the actual recording, not the METAR. My local airport's AWOS will say "greater than 10 miles" but the old AWOS at my college where I did my flight training would only say "10 miles." I've heard some ATIS stations report more up to 20 miles, or some say unlimited/unrestricted, but those are recorded by a person.I've read that it's due to the instrument used in measuring visibility that it isn't sensitive enough to report accurate visibility beyond 10 miles.In flightsim, the ATIS/ASOS/AWOS will say 20 miles, but the real weather download always sets the visibility to 50 miles if a METAR reports 10 miles.

the visibility here is normally 10 miles and most often with an unlimited ceiling. from what you're saying though it sounds like everything is ok. i did try downloading the weather in boston this morning since the weather channel said it was raining there and i got a 2 mile visibility, so it does seem like it is working. thanks very much for your input jim. william

have been trying that scott but hasn't helped. i'm thinking there might not be anything wrong after all, maybe.could just be the way the stations read the information or how they are set up to read it. also my lack of understanding. thanks for the help scott. william

well at that moment it wasn't raining but it rained most of that day and the two days before. just very overcast with rain most of those days. no sun or any clearing at all. FS provided cloudy skies with a 50 mile visibility for most of those days. i'm heading over to that link now. thanks for sending it and for your help. william