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Achico.198 net.aviation utzoo!decvax!duke!chico!ghe Fri Nov 20 22:14:23 1981 VOR weather Following from Aviation Week and Space Technology, November 16, 1981: Washington-Technique that can provide general aviation aircraft not equipped with airborne radar with a display showing the location of severe storms, transmitted via the aircraft's airborne VOR receiver, has been demonstrated by Mitre Corp. under FAA sponsorship. ... The new system is undergoing flight evaluation by scientists at Ohio University (sic), using data from a US Weather Service radar at Columbus that is being broadcast over a VOR station at Zanesville, OH. The FAA does not yet have cost estimates from avionics suppliers. But based on the cost of off-the-shelf hardware used in the current Mitre experiments, the cost of equipping a general aviation aircraft to display storm information is estimated at less than $2,000... [They use a TI TMS-9900 with 64kb of RAM for the airborne unit.] The technique involves compression of the wideband ground-based weather radar imagery, obtained from more than 40 such radars operated by the US Weather Service, so imagery can be broadcast over VOR stations in the coverage area of each radar, via the VOR voice channel. In the cockpit, a small, low-cost, commercially available printer is used to produce a 4 x 4 inch re-creation of the ground-radar imagery, showing the location and severity level of storms superimposed on the locations of VOR stations in the area to provide pilot orientation.... [The printer and VOR voice-channel can be used for other services, such as for PIREPS and Surface Obs requested by the pilot using a small push-button keyset.]

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