Date:       9/20/02 9:21 PM
To:         Bulletins
From:       Luis Soltero
Copy:       
Blind Copy: 
Subject:    How to Receive Weather via Marine Net



Hello All

This is the first of a multi part bulletin on receiving weather
information via e-mail through Marine Net.

As you all know there are 3 basic types of weather products
available via the Internet. They are regional text based forecasts,
weather fax(wefax), and grib files...

In this set of bulletins we describe how to request,  download,
and display these weather products using your Sat phone, or
HF radio and our e-mail service.

Let's start with textual forecasts and wefax.

The national weather service has setup up a mail robot
that accepts e-mail requests for some of it's weather products
including textual forecasts and wefax.  

The interface to the mail robot is very simple.  You send it mail
requesting 1 or more weather products and it sends you
back weather via e-mail as attachments.

To access the robot simply send mail to ftpmail@weather.noaa.gov.
the subject line in your mesg is ignored so you can leave it
empty and the body of the mesg contains the request.  

In your initial request you should simply have the word
"help" in your mesg body.  The robot on receiving your mail
will e-mail back to you instructions on the use of the
service.

Please note that many of you have signatures that automatically
get attached to your outgoing mail.  Mesgs that state that mail
should only be sent in text, etc...  ftpmail does not like signatures.
It thinks they are invalid commands and will report back to you
about invalidly formatted e-mails. You should disable your signature
when sending mail to ftpmail.  In Calypso while composing an e-mail
if you look at the bottom of the compose window you will see a
pull down list box labeled "Signature".  Simply clock on the list
box and select none to eliminate the signature.

Moving on...

One of the things you might want to request from ftpmail is
a list of products that can be retrieved using the service.
To get a list of all the textual off shore and Atlantic wefax products you would
send an e-mail with the following content in the body for example

open
cd fax
get rfaxatl.txt  
get marine4.txt
quit

ftpmail will then e-mail you back a listing of products.  Note
that each get request (2 in this example) results in a 1 e-mail.
So this example results in 2 e-mails sent to you by ftpmail.
Note that the help file contains a complete list of product listing files.
It tells you that marine4.txt is the offshore listing of products by
zones for example.  ftfaxatl.txt is the listing of wefax products for
the Atlantic.

To actually receive weather you might send an e-mail which contains
the following for example

open
cd /fax
get PYEB86.TIF
get PWEI88.TIF
get PWEE89.TIF
cd /data/forecasts/marine/offshore/am
get amz082.txt
quit

pyeb86.tif is the tropical surface analysis, pwei88.tif is the 48 hour
wind wave, and pwee89.tif is the 24 hour wind wave forecast.
amz082.txt is the off shore forecast of the Caribbean.  Again
look at the help file and the product listings to determine which
files to request.

A few comments on the above example...

Each weather product type lives in a different folder.  You
can mix and match product types in a single request as
long as you specify the folder prior to making the get
request.  "cd /fax" for example tells ftpmail that PWEB86.TIF
and friends is to be extracted from the "fax" folder.  
"cd /data/forecasts/marine/offshore/am" tells ftp mail to
send the off shore forecast from the /data.../am folder. Also
note textual products can live in  folders named (an, am, gm, etc.)
The folder the product lives in is included in the file name. So,
amz082.txt resides in the /data/.../am folder.  ANZ083.txt 
(the off shore forecast for England) would be in /data/.../an. 
Note that the directory structure for text products 
is not described very well in the ftpmail instructions.

finally note that in the ftpmail instructions folders are specified
as a number of individual commands.  The instructions in ftpmail
would have used 
 
cd data
cd forecasts
cd marine
cd offshore
cd am

for the above example.  It's much simpler to put them all in
one line as I have done above.  Either will work.  Note that
when requesting multiple product types the "/" after the cd
is important.  If you leave this out you will get an error for
when retrieving the second product type.  Using the long format
you would enter

cd /data
cd forecasts
cd marine
cd offshore
cd am

note that the "/" only occurs after the initial cd in the folder
sequence.

OK now it's time to give it a try.  Send the following
e-mail to ftpmail@weather.noaa.gov

help

and don't forget to "turn off" your signature.

A note on size...

** HF USERS **

Note that simple wefax products like the wind wave forecast
is about 35K to download.  On a good pactor III connect
this should take between 3-5 minutes.  On a poor connect
it could take forever... You definitely want green lights on your
modem when downloading these.  If you have poor propagation
and the speed and error indicators on your pactor modem are
mostly red then you should cancel the download and try again
on another frequency.  The e-mail on the server will not be deleted
until you have successfully downloaded the product.

Also keep in mind that as part of your subscription you are limited
to on average 20 minutes of connection time a day (10 hours a month).  Although
we give you the freedom to use these hours as you see fit the pop server
will terminate a connection that takes longer than 20 minutes.  If this happens
re-connect and the remainder of your mail will be downloaded.

Some products like the tropical surface analysis are bigger than 50K.  For
most of you this means that the mail will be directed to your BigMail
folder.  If you need to receive weather products that are larger than
50K then you will have to log on to the MarineNet webmail program
and modify the cutoff side in the BigMail filter.

Our preference here at MarineNet is that you use your wefax program
to get the weather products.  We know that at times this is impractical
(or impossible do to propagation, USCG failure to xmit, etc) and under
these conditions we welcome you to use our service to download 
wefaxes.

** SAT USERS ***

You can expect a typical wefax to download in about 1 minute
for Globalstar users and 2 minutes for Iridium.  The larger faxes
might take 2 minutes and 4 minutes for S* and IR users 
respectively.  MarineNet imposes no time restrictions on 
Sat users.... Download away if you like.

****

Textual products are very small and will not greatly impact your
connect times.  Feel free to get these any time you see fit.

That's it for this bulletin.  In the next one we discuss how
to view the weather products you just received and how
to automate the weather request procedure.

One last note... Your friends using SailMail can not use ftpmail to
receive wefaxes since SailMail does not permit attachments and limits
the size of incoming e-mails to 5K.  SailMail users are also limited
to 10 minutes a day and can not use lump sums of time like you can.

And... if you are still using pactor II then please upgrade to pactor III.
MarineNet users can upgrade from II to III for free as part of their
subscription service.  Do not download wefaxes unless you are using
pactor III.

Thanks,


--luis