"I personally will never again go offshore without access to WeatherNet. Great product, and, seamless reliable software."
AJ Fougere

 

"I use WeatherNet in all my deliveries, it's the only game in town. You can go ahead and put that in your commercial!"
Jack Harvey

In a nut shell -
For over 9 years, WeatherNet has run under the same business model…$99 per year for service, pay-as-you need content charges, no premium service levels, special or hidden charge plans, no minimum monthly fees, no standby fees. WeatherNet uses built-in transfer engines to accelerate data and save you money on downloads over satellite connections.

WeatherNet is the LEAST costly means of delivering the widest and deepest array of weather and ocean data to marine users.

WeatherNet, patent pending,  is a system designed to optimize the download of weather and ocean data products via wireless connections. The service offers highly compressed text, images, charts, buoy data, radar, GRIB files, and many more formats. With over 20,000 continuously updated weather products, WeatherNet is the largest most comprehensive source of weather data in the world. All data are available to the user on demand by the push of a button. 

WeatherNet contains the most extensive collection of weather products for mariners in the world. Categories include:

How it works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Users simply drag the weather products he/she wishes to download into a batch folder and then pushes the button. WeatherNet immediately connects to the server via a wireless connection or via and email service and downloads the requested data. After the download, WeatherNet can be configured to automatically display the new weather data with programs such as OCENS GRIB Explorer or other viewers. WeatherNet consists of 3 components.

* Internet Robot:

It continually crawls the internet updating the local content store of weather data on a Central server that is stored in a secure co-location facility with 100% network access guaranteed assuring the user the most complete and up to date repository of weather data anywhere. Note that about 1/2 the weather products are generated locally and packaged specifically for WeatherNet.

* Weather Server:

It interacts with the client application running on the user's computer. The server accepts requests for weather data, compresses the data, packs the data into a proprietary data stream specifically designed for wireless data connections, and sends the data to the client application.

* Client Application:

It interacts directly with the user allowing him/her to easily select weather products adding them to batches which can with the click of a button be enabled or disabled. By simply pushing a button the application connects to the server via the desired wireless interface and immediately downloads the requested weather.

To download weather you simply run the WeatherNet client on your Windows PC, enable or disable the preconfigured batches or create a new batch for your specific circumstance, push the download button, and then view the data. The download is completed in a few minutes, on demand, when you need the data. This product is revolutionary in that there are no firm schedules to adhere to or lengthy downloads. You get the data you need, when you need it and on your own terms.

Here are some of the ways we reduce weather data sizes and save you money.

* Proprietary transfer protocol -

The WeatherNet server speaks to the client running on your PC with a wireless protocol specifically designed to optimize download transfers of data. Standard internet protocols such as FTP and HTTP are very inefficient when downloading weather over a wireless device such as a satellite phone. Our benchmarks show an increase of 3x when transferring comparable data with WeatherNet vs. FTP over a Globalstar satellite link. A factor of 7x improvement has been observed for HTTP transfers over the same medium.

* Proprietary compression of weather images -

39;s compression technology reduces standard weather images by 2 to 10 times their original size. Ocean temperature charts for example are compressed down to by a factor of 8x. Weather charts are compressed with a factor of 4x going from 32K to 8K for example. Buoy GIF data starts out at about 22K and get squeezed to 2K for an impressive compression factor of 10x.

* HTML stripping -

All HTML weather content is converted to plain text reducing sizes by a factor of 5. A 10K offshore HTML forecast is reduced to 2K for example.

* Data condensation -

For certain weather products, such as Buoy data, WeatherNet extracts pertinent material removing non essential extras. Buoy Text goes from 100 lines to 2 lines yielding current observation data and removing all historical readings.

Bottom line... WeatherNet's advanced compression features dramatically reduce the time required to download weather. This savings in time translates directly to savings for you. Our motto is that "it's cheaper to pay for WeatherNet than it is to receive the forecast for free from other sources".

Wireless Interfaces

WeatherNet supports any wireless interface that supports a Windows Dial Up Interface. Supported devices include: PRICING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

WeatherNet's fee structure is also revolutionary. Users simply activate their account and then pay for the weather they download. Each weather product is priced independently; data costs and estimated air time are computed prior to the download. The amazing thing is that WeatherNet is so efficient that you will pay less using this for pay service than you would downloading this data for free over the internet using conventional methods!

Cross sample of some of the data available including sample pricing.

Aviation	06HR FL390 WIND AND TEMPERATURE V06Z Western Atlantic	$0.30
Buoy	Buoy 46001 at Offshore Gulf of AK AK.216	$0.18
Ice	Regional Antarctica Ice Edge Polar view of South pole	$0.50
Nexrad	Composite long range reflectivity for Anchorage station	$0.30
Ocean Chart	Barents Sea Sea Surface Temp (SST)	$0.90
Weather Chart	12 Z Sea State Analysis, 45 W - 85 W Northern Hemisphere	$0.30
Text	Brownsville, TX Coastal Forecast	$0.18
Satellite Imagery	Atlantic basin GOES IR	$0.90
GRIB	Hi-Resolution Sea Surface Temperatures	$2.00
GRIB	One Day Winds available globally	$0.39