Here is the reply from an engineer at Camber Corporation about the WX radar simulator. I don't believe I'll be buying one in this life. Not at least until I see what the latest developement might be that he writes about toward the end of the e-mail.

Oh well. It was a nice thought.



----- Original Message -----
From: Pafford, Mike
To: Boeing727
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2007 7:51 AM
Subject: RE: Sensor Systems Division: Question/Comment from Cambertx Website


Dear Mr. Carter,


Thank you for your interest in our simulation products. And yes, we rarely deal with the general public – most of our systems are sold for use on flight simulators used by the commercial airlines and military customers.

The Camber WX radar simulation package can be sold as a software only package or as a turn key system. The software is set up to use a Camber video interface board which conforms to the ARINC-453 interface which is the standard physical interface to cockpit radar indicators. Our simulation generates data which is formatted to the ARINC-708 specification and in some cases our customers emulate the radar indicator and transmit the 708 data format over Ethernet – mostly that happens in research applications. A turn key package with a PC in a rackmount case with the ARINC-453 video interface, the software, storm library, etc. is around $25,000. A used weather radar indicator can typically be bought for around $5,000. So I assume we are out of your price range with our current range of products.

Microsoft has recently announced the ESP product which is basically MS FS with a license which allows use in commercial applications and provides some additional API controls. We are planning on developing simulation products based on ESP in the near future. So perhaps we will have a weather radar simulation which will be able to “plug and play” with FS in the future. So keep watching the web site for additional information.



Regards,

Mike Pafford
Engineering Manager
Camber Corporation
Sensor System Division