Thanks for that info, in fact I’m just preparing for my PPL over on this side of the ocean.
A02 or A01 is, as far as I know, appended to every METAR that is generated by an ASOS or AWOS machine. That mark will be missing if it was generated by a human, say at a larger airport that has an ATIS system.
I fly from a bigger airport with its own CTR and ATIS, but the METAR is automated, except it just says AUTO, no A01/02. Wonder if that’s also an EASA/FAA difference.
You’ll hear AWOS systems say “Visibility. More than. One. Zero.”
We are pampered then, we get a fluid pleasant female voice announcing “visibility one-zero kilometres or more” on the automated ATIS reports. I’m not sure that AWOS and ASOS exist here though, but we have CTRs and ATIS systems almost touching each other in these parts everywhere anyway.
US flight instructor since 2010. Haven’t flown in a little while though.
AWOS and ASOS systems (ASOS being slightly more fasisticated) are the automated systems you’ll find at smaller uncontrolled airports; they transmit an automated voice reading the weather on a VHF COM frequency and often link back to the National Weather Service (or however the byzantine soon to be gone series of government agencies that could plausibly be in charge would deal with it) to generate METARs you’ll get from the usual scumbags, and when you see a weather map on the news with the temperatures scattered around, they’re almost all from airport systems, it’s where almost all of the government thermometers are.
A lot of them are decades old and use the sound board method of making a machine talk. Short little clips of a guy saying a word or two played in sequence. I actually prefer them to a lot of the actual voice synths they had in use. For some dumb reason most of them are male voices and fairly deep so they’re down in the noise floor, higher pitched/women’s voices carry on radios better.
ATIS systems will either still be a loop of an actual person’s voice recording, or I started to hear some that had a Stephen Hawking style voice synth that weren’t easy to read back.
Thanks for that info, in fact I’m just preparing for my PPL over on this side of the ocean.
I fly from a bigger airport with its own CTR and ATIS, but the METAR is automated, except it just says AUTO, no A01/02. Wonder if that’s also an EASA/FAA difference.
We are pampered then, we get a fluid pleasant female voice announcing “visibility one-zero kilometres or more” on the automated ATIS reports. I’m not sure that AWOS and ASOS exist here though, but we have CTRs and ATIS systems almost touching each other in these parts everywhere anyway.
US flight instructor since 2010. Haven’t flown in a little while though.
AWOS and ASOS systems (ASOS being slightly more fasisticated) are the automated systems you’ll find at smaller uncontrolled airports; they transmit an automated voice reading the weather on a VHF COM frequency and often link back to the National Weather Service (or however the byzantine soon to be gone series of government agencies that could plausibly be in charge would deal with it) to generate METARs you’ll get from the usual scumbags, and when you see a weather map on the news with the temperatures scattered around, they’re almost all from airport systems, it’s where almost all of the government thermometers are.
A lot of them are decades old and use the sound board method of making a machine talk. Short little clips of a guy saying a word or two played in sequence. I actually prefer them to a lot of the actual voice synths they had in use. For some dumb reason most of them are male voices and fairly deep so they’re down in the noise floor, higher pitched/women’s voices carry on radios better.
ATIS systems will either still be a loop of an actual person’s voice recording, or I started to hear some that had a Stephen Hawking style voice synth that weren’t easy to read back.