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Happy Holidays from FSU; Alden and FSU are both operating on skeleton crews so progress has been slow but we have had the Alden feed now for a few days and are somewhat satisfied with it. The resolution problem on surface files has been solved and the quality is equal to that on the images provided by Unisys. However, Alden is still sending surface maps with 1/4" of the map at the top or bottom cut off, which is an annoying problem but not too serious I suppose. Other maps are coming in under their ZFX numbers reliably (available on the Unidata home page is a nice schedule with the old difax # and the new IDD sequence number/file name). However, some upper level maps (at least, and maybe others?) seem to have a reduced resolution compared to their counterparts from Unisys. They are still better than the Okidata print outs, (we are using a laser printer), but the files from Unisys (like 200 mb chart) appear to be at approximately 50% better resolution in at least one direction. Some things to watch for...the file names (like 2003.g3) that come in may repeat as often as every 6 hours; therefore scheduling/automating/archiving? the conversion and print-outs of some of these things will cause some consternation on the part of the end-user; we are trying to tackle that issue now. We will share what we can on our anonymous ftp server in the Difax area in terms of comparisons, scripts, etc. Expect satellite feed to go down soon I suppose. Thanks to Harry and David (don't they own a fruit company too?) and Larry and the UPC staff from Andy Devanas and myself at FSU. You and others have all helped us to figure out how this is going to work. And thanks to Alden, too, who I gather is venturing out into new territory! Paul Ruscher / FSU Meteorology
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