Gliding Software > Spine

NOTAM's not displaying

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peastlake:
I have installed SPINE V5.1 on two PC's - one at home & one at our microlight club's clubhouse.

The home PC installation works fine.

The clubhouse one doesn't! It appears to have installed okay & ALL the program settings are the same on both versions. However, wheras the home PC normally shows hundred's of NOTAMs , the club PC shows exactly 2 - & has done on the 4 days I've tried it.

Both PC's run AVG 8 free. The home PC (Vista) is on a nominal 10 MBPS cable broadband connection. The club PC (XP) is via a T-Mobile wireless connection running at a nominal 3MBPS

Any ideas?

Paul Eastlake
Hunsdon Microlight Club

http://www.hunsdonmicrolightclub.info/

jeff:
Just took a look at your location. You are pretty squashed-in there: I guess you don't fly too far north-east  :)

I assume you've set your home airfield manually to N51 48 E000 4. What range have you set? I don't understand why you should be having a problem if the settings are identical.

Please could you save your downloaded NOTAMs for the same day on each PC and email me the .spn files (they will have file names in the format 20090531.spn by default, depending on the date - please change the file names so I know which is which). The operating system and internet connection should not be a factor. Apart from setting your home airfield and range, have you changed any of the default settings?

And when you say the club PC shows exactly 2: are they the same 2 or do they change? Is it the same both for the main dialog and the plot window? Are you looking at all NOTAMs in the main dialog, or only included ones?

You can email me at jeff AT enborne DOT f2s DOT com.

jeff:
I've looked at the file you sent me and compared it with a working save on my system from the same day. For some reason, yours starts losing new lines on the download, after the first few lines. I don't understand why this is happening: it may be something to do with the internet connection, but it's not happened before (i.e. no one else appears to have experienced this).

It only seems to be losing the new lines - if it was caused by a flaky connection I would have expected other things to be corrupted as well. Also, new lines are preserved in pre-formatted text (for example in the NOTAM description).

Thinking about it some more, the new lines are only removed where they occur between HTML tags. I have a suspicion that T-Mobile is somehow optimising the transfer, and removing new lines where they are not normally needed.

I have just sent the following email to T-Mobile, hoping that they can suggest something:

--- Quote ---Hi. I provide (free) software which a large number of glider pilots (500+) use to download information from the internet. One particular club has a T-Mobile 3Mbps wireless connection which is causing my program problems. I suspect that your software is removing new lines between HTML tags (which are not normally necessary) in order to optimise the transfer, but which my program relies on.
Can you please confirm if this is the case, and whether any setting can be changed to avoid this - or do I need to modify my program? Thanks and regards.

--- End quote ---

jeff:
Well, T-Mobile are obviously not geared up to answer queries from non-customers (even if on behalf of a customer). I received a stock answer asking for my mobile number, account number etc. etc. So that route is a non-starter.

In fact, I do need to make a slight change to the software, so that it can parse the incoming data correctly, even if some expected but non-essential data is removed as in this case.

Meanwhile, I'm afraid you're still going to have problems with your T-Mobile connection at the club.

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