Radar functionality
Added 2021-01-01 03:56:04 +0000 UTCAs most of you are probably already aware, the radar in the simulator ceased functioning in mid December. This is a direct result of major changes that the National Weather Service made with the radar data on their servers. They have permanently discontinued the radar echo data source that the simulator used.
In order to get the radar in the simulator functioning again, it will in essence require a complete rewrite of the radar processing code to use the new data source, as it is that different from what was being used.
A couple of positive things from this, when this reimplementation in the simulator happens, is it will bring some improvements:
1) The new radar echo source on the NWS webservers has much improved ground clutter filtering, so the simulator will have radar echos that are more accurate and faithful to the original 4000.
2) I will probably move the functionality to be mostly server side, so that when it changes again in the future, it won't require a new release to be fixed.
As for when this will be done, I am hoping I can get started on it in January at some point. There are a lot of things going on right now that I have to handle. My macOS and linux build machines also had complete reinstalls which obliterated my build environments on them, so it's likely that those binaries will be delayed for a while.
Here's to hoping for a better new year.
