I am loving the trial of ASN, and will no doubt purchase soon, but I have a small suggestion to make.  In all prior Hifi products the weather station in the wx conditions page always defaulted to the nearest station, but in ASN one has to go to the favorites button and click on nearest station.  It's kind of tedious to have to go to these steps, as you would expect the program to pick up on the nearest station for you.   Is there any chance this can be fixed, or made a user option so that we don't have to go though these clicks?

 

There must be a reason the change was made, can you share with us the rationale?  

I guess the reason for the change was the smooth transition between wx stations during flight and, consequently, your current wx being interpolated between stations.

 

I would second a user option to toggle between the current implementation and the nearest station's data.

The main reason is that depending on the distance from the closest station (or the presence of other close stations), we may get different depiction at the aircraft position compared to what the station reports.

 

We selected as default to show there the conditions at the current aircraft position instead, so that you can get an idea why we depict the weather this way inside the sim. Similar (and even more precise information about the ambient parameters at the aircraft location) is given through the ambient monitor (in the debug window) or as a popup window when hovering the mouse over the user aircraft on the map window. You'll see for example there information about turbulence and how it was created (in real time).

 

122.0 on the other hand will report the closest station instead (to simulate more or less how things work in real life).

 

So, short answer the reason for this, is that closest station is simply inaccurate most times and it will not be representative of your current weather depiction at the aircraft location.

 

Thanks,

 

Kostas Terzides

ASN developer

Informative answer!   That makes perfect sense, and I feel comfortable in the knowledge that the weather really is not so cut and dry, that it is an ever changing "living" environment just like in the real world.   This is exactly the kind of depiction I was hoping to see in the sim, and the smart interpolation which is always running in the background to help smooth out changes among weather stations is something I have always pondered.  This approach seems the closest we get to the real world complexities of weather phenomenon and the theory of meteorological science.