I have AS and the Active Radar add on. Both work fine for me. I'm now considering also purchasing the wx500 weather radar from Reality XP but was just wondering what, if any, advantages it has over the AS radar. I almost always use AS weather when flying.

I have AS 2004.5. It appears their Active Radar works from the METAR reports and is not a function of the FS observed environment. At one time you had to load your flight plan into it. It was also a windowed module not capable of being installed into a panel and would function as a pop-up only. I never really got it to work but I was under W98SE at the time. The info I have on it is not up-to-date.I do use the Reality-XP WX500. It is a regular gauge that can be incorporated into panels. They have a community area on their web site that has preconfigured panels or you can use your own panel editor or text edit panel.cfg after you run their configuration utility. It also functions as a pop-up. It detects moisture with electrostatic charge (ie. the real WX500 StormScope) in your 3D clouds practically just like radar. The only difficulty which they acknowledge is returns on precipitation under an overcast, a bug they are working on. The display actually lets you see the concentrations in CBs as rendered in FS so you can steer around heavy turbulence. It does not depend on a specific weather application. It has worked well enough for me. I really like it. They have white papers on the use of it on their web site.You might wish to visit their support forum here:http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_topics.asp?FID=12hosted by Flight1, their distributor.

Many thanks for the information.