W2BRS
Newbie
- Joined
- Jul 26, 2026
- Messages
- 2
- Reaction score
- 11
Hi all, first post. I'm mostly a listener - some low-power FT8 when I do key up. Some of my radio time goes into SDRs, and I've got a real weakness for a good data puzzle. 
A while back I ran across mentions of the Ambient Information Network, the datacast that fed those desktop weather forecasters from the 2000s (some examples I can find are the Bushnell WeatherFX and a few Radio Shack / Brookstone ones). Those got fed over the pager network, and there were posts here and there saying that it shut down years ago. First: I am happy to report the network is only mostly dead. And mostly dead is as we know slightly alive - some of it is still transmitting in 2026, around the clock, to whatever forecasters out there are still listening. The 2020 thread about it is here.
That thread was a big help on the background. In the thread, nobody ever answered this question: "but how are the numbers for temperatures represented?"
So here you go... The answer: each city gets 12 characters. The first two are the current temperature, and the other ten are a five-day forecast, one two-character pair per day, high then low, each character worth 2°F per step. There's a day-of-week character in the header. The capcodes turn out to be device serials rather than site addresses, and the three-letter city codes are the network's own somewhat arbitrary scheme. Decoded values line up with NWS.
For example: ~&=/&Y@ielgofmckb"""!!BLM - that's Bloomington, IL (code BLM) reporting a 71F current temp, followed by five days of its highs and lows: 81/70, 87/74, 93/72, 89/66, and 85/64.
I have the full writeup here, and I included a decoder so you can paste raw lines in if you want to try it against your own capture.
There are a few things I'm still working through. The big one: 53 of the city codes I've logged don't resolve to real city names yet - my approach is mapping out which cities could possibly have the temperature values I'm seeing. Anyway, that's all! Happy decoding!
Patrick
A while back I ran across mentions of the Ambient Information Network, the datacast that fed those desktop weather forecasters from the 2000s (some examples I can find are the Bushnell WeatherFX and a few Radio Shack / Brookstone ones). Those got fed over the pager network, and there were posts here and there saying that it shut down years ago. First: I am happy to report the network is only mostly dead. And mostly dead is as we know slightly alive - some of it is still transmitting in 2026, around the clock, to whatever forecasters out there are still listening. The 2020 thread about it is here.
That thread was a big help on the background. In the thread, nobody ever answered this question: "but how are the numbers for temperatures represented?"
So here you go... The answer: each city gets 12 characters. The first two are the current temperature, and the other ten are a five-day forecast, one two-character pair per day, high then low, each character worth 2°F per step. There's a day-of-week character in the header. The capcodes turn out to be device serials rather than site addresses, and the three-letter city codes are the network's own somewhat arbitrary scheme. Decoded values line up with NWS.
For example: ~&=/&Y@ielgofmckb"""!!BLM - that's Bloomington, IL (code BLM) reporting a 71F current temp, followed by five days of its highs and lows: 81/70, 87/74, 93/72, 89/66, and 85/64.
I have the full writeup here, and I included a decoder so you can paste raw lines in if you want to try it against your own capture.
There are a few things I'm still working through. The big one: 53 of the city codes I've logged don't resolve to real city names yet - my approach is mapping out which cities could possibly have the temperature values I'm seeing. Anyway, that's all! Happy decoding!
Patrick
