Little Navmap can display METARs from several sources:
- FSX or P3D if connected. This also applies to network setups.
- X-Plane real time weather from the
METAR.rwxfile. Not available when Little Navmap runs on a different computer than your flight simulator. - NOAA online weather service
- VATSIM network online weather service
- HiFi Simulation Technologies:
- Active Sky Next (ASN)
- AS16
- Active Sky for Prepar3D v4 (ASP4)
You can define in the Options dialog on the Weather tab which sources are used to display the METAR information in tooltips or the tab Weather in the Information dock window.
You have to set the base path for X-Plane in the Load Scenery Library dialog to enable reading of the weather file. Certain features like regions of manually created weather files are not supported.
METARs are shown in the airport tooltips and on the Airport overview tab. Decoded weather information for all sources is available in the tab Weather.
The date and time information of the decoded weather display is highlighted in red if the METAR information is older than six hours.
Notes about X-Plane weather:
Little Navmap can only read the X-Plane METAR.rwx file which contains downloaded online weather. The program cannot read custom weather situations from X-Plane. If you use custom weather, Little Navmap only has access to the local weather around the aircraft. Be aware that Little Navmap might display information from an obsolete or inactive downloaded weather file.
Picture above: Decoded weather information from two online sources. Flight simulator is not connected.
Weather information from a flight simulator or the X-Plane METAR.rwx falls in one of three categories, depending on the selected airport:
Station: The airport has a weather station. This is the most precise weather indication.Nearest: The selected airport has no weather station and the report from the closest existing weather station was fetched. The ident of the closest station as well as distance and elevation are shown in the METAR and on the decoded weather tab. Note that the this weather station is not necessarily an airport.Interpolated(not for X-Plane): The weather is interpolated by the flight simulator using three stations closest to the selected airport. FSX and P3D only provide non-interpolated weather for airports close to the user aircraft. The weather for other airports is always interpolated. The ident of the selected airport is used in the METAR report for this kind of weather report.
The flight simulator weather is updated every 15 seconds to catch changes in the weather theme.
Little Navmap watches the X-Plane METAR.rwx file for changes and will apply updates immediately.
Note that the nearest weather will not necessarily depict the weather at the selected station due to the interpolation between multiple stations which is done by the simulator.
Online weather from both sources is updated every 10 minutes.
All Active Sky programs are recognized automatically on startup for each simulator.
The current_wx_snapshot.txt and activeflightplanwx.txt files are loaded and monitored for changes. Weather will be reloaded and updated in the
information display if necessary.
You can also select the current_wx_snapshot.txt file manually. In that case the
METARs from this file are displayed for all installed flight simulators. The activeflightplanwx.txt will be loaded from the same directory.
Manual file selection can also be useful if a new Active Sky version is not supported by Little Navmap yet.
Departure and destination weather will be displayed if a flight plan is loaded in one of the
Active Sky programs. A suffix Destination or Departure will indicate the usage of Active Sky flight plan weather
on the tab Weather. This gives Active Sky users the most precise weather indication for departure and destination.
Note that the indication of Departure or Destination depends entirely on the flight plan loaded in Active Sky and not the flight plan in Little Navmap.