Notams and NotamPlot v2.1

[orionsbelt]

Doing Notams this morning for the weekend and a 50 mile plot around my Essex airfield came up with 24 pages of print from my Avbrief account. Went to the NATS page and it was horrid as I could not get the thing to work. Nats said it was working ok????
Really got the hump with it all and then did a PPRUNE search and came up with NotamPlot v2.1.
Have just installed this and its excellent
Its a good graphic plot of all the bits that matter in your area and route
You need an Avbrief account (Guest or Subscriber ) but it seems to take out all the pain associated with notam management.

Why have Nats not done something like this, will help a lot of people??
For those like me who did not know of this the Link is

http://www.notamplot.flyer.co.uk/

Cheers Orions***

[DFC]

Great piece of software but more work required.

The main problem we found is a long list of unplotted notams that one must read through and to make it harder, when one uses the filter to reduce the details to simply the current day, the list of unplotted just gets longer thus the filter is not of any real benifit.

There is also the matter that if one is in the middle of a very large NOTAM then if one has zoomed in on the map, one could miss the NOTAM. eg you are on a 100nm range in the middle of a 150nm radius NOTAM!

Furthermore, it does not plot temporary Class A airspace correctly. eg a temporary airway from X to Y would be plotted as a circle with x and y at the outer limits and not as a 10nm wide corridor.

Most of these problems are caused by how AIS format the NOTAM and some cooperation could reduce the problems.

What we use it for is simply to see where some of the military exercise areas are but use the AIS raw data for the actual briefing. This is where it is of real benifit.

Better than NOTAM Pro software at last look though and well worth the few quid to charity provided one is aware of the limitations.

Regards,

DFC