Hifisim has recently released a change to their ActiveSky XP12 weather program, which sources historical weather less than 10 days old from NOAA rather than their own servers. That has introduced a 2-3 minute delay in obtaining the weather data. Since they made those changes, attempts to upload historical weather from within the last 10 days to Simbrief results in a timeout–Simbrief gets to ~5% and hangs at “Waiting for Activesky” and then maybe a minute later throws an error “Unable to validate activesky weather download”
I think the timeout limit needs to be adjusted to allow for the longer lag in weather uploads from AS when the date/time are within the last 10 days. Weather for dates older than 10 days is still obtained from Hifi’s datanet server, and still works normally with SimBrief.
Wow, 2-3 minutes is quite a long time. I’m not sure when/how/if I’ll be able to increase the timeout, but in the mean time, can you try the following workaround and let me know if it works?
In ASXP12, set the weather mode to the historical date/time you wish to depart at.
Wait until the weather has finished downloading (you can check this by looking at the activity status message at the top right of ASXP12) .
On your PC’s taskbar (bottom-right near the clock), right click the SimBrief Downloader icon and choose “Upload Active Sky Weather”.
Create a new flight in SimBrief, scroll down to the “Historical Weather” section, and choose “Enabled - Use your uploaded snapshot”. If prompted, choose “Change Date” so that your departure date matches that of your snapshot.
The original topic was closed after only 2 days, so I could not reply, so I will here in a new thread as I do have something to add.
The workaround (manually uploading weather via the Simbrief downloader) worked. Thank you for that.
One possibly related oddity that I want to mention is that when I try to upload historical weather from within Simbrief, it appears Simbrief is first requesting weather for sometime the day prior to the selected date/time. The ASXP12 logs consistently show an http request for weather the day prior–e.g. if I have 14 Jan at 17Z in the flight plan and then attempt to upload a new weather snapshot from within Simbrief, the ASXP log shows an http request for weather on 13 Jan, and the date/time in the window header of ASXP12 will first change to 13 Jan at what appears to be a random time (but not 1700Z), and then it will eventually switch to the requested date/time. I don’t know if that’s intentional or not, but it looks anomalous to me.
Back when this was programmed, the only way to detect if Active Sky had finished downloading its weather data was to force a data download and wait for the snapshot file to get updated. And the only way to reliably force a data download was to set a different date, then switch back to the desired date.
Whether or not this is still necessary in their new API will need to be investigated eventually.
Hi, you need to right click the tray icon (the one closer to the right side of the screen). Possibly you might need to click the small arrow to show the icon first:
Hello,
I tried this method, but it doesn’t work either. SimBrief Downloader version 1.8 does not read the file generated by AS - other applications I use do not have this problem.
Please help, I already wrote in another post about the problems with downloading weather - the previous version did not cause problems
