PilotGEEK Blog

The other day one of my subscribers, Mike, asked if there were anyway he could get decoded text messages – the only problem his cell provider was NEXTEL now a Sprint service that doesn’t support MMS messaging.  Well working with him and researching the options, I confirmed there is currently no way to deliver an MMS message directly to a Sprint/NEXTEL cell phone.

At that point, Mike asked if I could just send the decoded message to his registered email account, since he got email on his Blackberry.

So I put in a quick hack to force an email response whenever Mike sent a text message request.

It was the same day that I received a bill for my company provided Blackberry.  Being a corporate phone, text and MMS messages were charged for each sent or received.

To say a light went on is an understatement! And now you can take advantage of the solution.

To use the email interface, just send the same text message style request from your registered email address.  The PilotGEEK service will send the response, encoded or decoded based upon your text message configuration setting, back to your email address.  Just like the MMS interface, all of the responses will be included in a single response.

To remind you, to use PilotGEEK’s text message interface, just send a text message or now an email from your registered email address, to txt@pilotgeek.com.  The first line of the message should look like:

AirportID req1 req2

where req1, req2 can be:

A – asos

M – metar

TA -taf

TF – tfr

W – wa

R – radar

L – Loop Radar

You can put as many requests in the first line as you’d like and you can just use the unique part of the request or the complete word, so M, ME, met and metar will all return the metar data.

I hope you find the enhanced feature useful.  Remember many of the new features come from you, the subscribers.

Safe Flying.

Tom Nery

Manager

PilotGEEK, LLC

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