When flying and approaching destination, I leave the frquency to check weather. How close to the destination do I have to be to get the surface conditions, rather than the outside conditions at the time?Approaching BDA yesterday afternoon at 2000' the outside temperature was quoted as -5. I dont think it ever gets this cold there.

Hi Raymond,If you are using FSMeteo or Active Sky you can set the distance at which the destination weather becomes available. Check the documentation if you have these.If you are using the FS2002 weather system the answer is not until the destination becomes the current reporting station.There may just be a problem with the reported temp. See if you are getting winds, pressure, clouds etc. reported correctly.All the best,John

set the force distance to 60 miles in the weather programsfsmeteo will correctly give arrival weather with rc v3.0activesky will correctly give arrival weather with rc v3.01weather center will correctly give arrival weather with a new release of weather center and version 3.02 (not coded yet)if you are using activesky, send me an email

Thanks guys.I am using real world weather option of FS2002. I'm fairly sure the pressure and winds were OK, but the temp was definately wrong.I've no experience of other weather generators. Can I get real world weather from FS Meteo for instance?

fsmeteo broke down all the weather barriers in fs200x. active sky is very popular. weather center is coming on quickly. there should be links to all three on my links page at www.jdtllc.com

Raymond,Pretty much everthing BUT FS gives realtime weather. There are exceptions, of course, when METARs are late. The main difference between the generators and FS is that they load in any or all stations and can update on a regular basis - from 6 minutes to hours to never (DL the entire world's weather once) depending on your preferences.Not only that, FS_Meteo keeps a server with a year's worth of METAR data, so you can fly your favorite day back in tornado season.Plus, the 3rd-party generators have oodles of features you'll never find in FS - like looking at any station weather in the world, setting destination weather lock distance, and not least, they all report to RC correctly when they should (or they all will, most do).