8Flight Works Seamlessly with Starlink

NEXRAD provides meteorologists a 4D picture of the weather by having each radar site scan the atmosphere at different tilt angles about every 20 seconds. During precipitation, they usually scan 14 different elevations -- looking 0.5 degrees up, 0.9 degrees up, 1.3 degrees up, etc.

Other apps (and ADS-B and SiriusXM) wait for a single site to complete all 14 scans in about 5 minutes before combining all of that data from every site across the country every few minutes. That's also a lot of data to process at once, so that takes a few more minutes. And if a site hadn't completed a full scan for some reason, or didn't complete one in time, it won't be considered until the next time. So by the time you're seeing it, some of that data could be 15-20 minutes old.

Instead of waiting to process all that data at once, 8Flight sends each radar sweep directly to the app and dynamically combines it there. So the data is about 30 seconds old when you first see it.

Other apps also remove a lot of detail so it's hard to see the storm's true structure or what the radar might be missing because of terrain. Sometimes that even leads to filtering out the strongest part of a cell or an entire cell altogether. 8Flight preserves the native resolution of the radar so you never miss a thing. It even alerts you to reduced coverage when an individual site hasn't reported data for several minutes.