GOES West Transition Date Confirmed

The GOES West Transition date has been confirmed.  The transition is now scheduled for December 14, 2011.  The following information was posted on the EMWIN website.

GOES West
GOES 15 is set to replace GOES 11 (West) on December 14, 2011. All EMWIN users should obtain EMWIN-N capable systems to continue to receive the satellite broadcasts. Legacy EMWIN Equipment must be upgraded.

What GOES West Users need to do

For GOES West (11) users with EMWIN-N capable systems the transition will be very simple, wait for the change to occur and then configure the software demodulator. Then toggle the switch on the intermediate frequency adapter to the “QPSK” setting. Processing of the EMWIN-N broadcast can then begin.

Users that have not upgraded their legacy EMWIN systems still have options. On or before December 14, 2011 legacy users need to re-point to GOES 12 at 60 degrees West. We recommend that these legacy users should try re-pointing to GOES 12 as soon as possible to determine if they will be able to acquire the signal from their location. Legacy users not able to receive the GOES 12 broadcast can continue to receive EMWIN with an internet connection through the EMWIN byteblaster network.

The transition could occur earlier due to premature failure of the GOES 11 satellite. All users need to migrate to EMWIN-N capable systems. Please see the vendor page on the EMWIN website.

GOES 12 is operating at 60 degrees West to help support the Caribbean and South America. The EMWIN-I 9.6 kbps signal was activated on GOES 12 on May 5, 2010 and will remain on until further notice. This service will eventually end, so it is strongly recommended that users transition as soon as possible.

XMPP Support Added

Weather Message now supports the XMPP protocol.  XMPP is implemented as a paging service.  If you don't know what XMPP is, here is the information provided by the XMPP Standards Foundation.

The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an open technology for real-time communication, which powers a wide range of applications including instant messaging, presence, multi-party chat, voice and video calls, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, and generalized routing of XML data.

XMPP is used by Google for Google talk. It is also used by the National Weather Service for their NWSChat service.  Here is a list of XMPP clients listed on the Google website http://www.google.com/talk/otherclients.html

This addition allows Weather Message to post alerts to chat groups.  The posted messages can be in any of the supported Weather Message formats, short, selected or full.