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Gray station weather


Dakota Laughlin

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I hope this is the right place for this, anyways.. I've felt for awhile Gray stations have lacked in weather technology for awhile especially compared to say Nexstar stations, anyone see any Gray stations with unique technology rolling out? Any chance Gray will roll out some new radar marketing similar to some of Nexstar's "Vipir" radars? Thoughts/ideas much appreciated!

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One of the bottlenecks is that all stations, no matter their affiliation or ownership, are at the mercy of Baron, AccuWeather, and The Weather Company/IBM (no, Allen doesn't get a discount just because they own The Weather Channel), and whatever they want to charge for their systems. You can only really add on their proprietary tech these days outside of observer stations, and most of the radars now outside of Tornado Alley and the Bible Belt are the NWS station radars, not self-owned. VIPIR is also not Nexstar-specific, and is offered by many stations in different groups.

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Oh okay that makes sense, I spoke with some internal people at my local station (WSAZ) and they claimed their holdup with any sort of weather upgrades was Gray and when they would allow it, I doubt they theirselves would go with VIPIR branding as competition WOWK already uses that as of a year or two ago.

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Gray mostly uses WSI for weather. The majority of stations groups uses WSI and Barron/viper is a distance second then there are a few very small players. In Wisconsin, WSAW and WMTV looks like they have the latest WSI software while WBAY which Gray has own for only a few years uses some Barron products mostly for severe weather coverage (station owned radar that’s maybe 20 years old) and uses an older version of WSI for day to day weather, some of WBAY’s base weather maps look like they were design for 4:3 and then stretched for 16:9 TV. It will take time for Gray to get that all fixed.  
 

If you did a poll of TV Meteorologist most would say WSI is best for regular weather and social media but it would be much closer between Barrons and WSI for radars. Back in the day Barron was a clear number one for radar products and many stations would use Barrons for radar and WSI or Weather Central for weather graphics. WSI does sell radars to local stations but NWS radars have improved so much that the need for station owned radar isn’t like it was 10 or more years ago unless if you’re in a NWS radar dead zone.

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6 minutes ago, Dakota Laughlin said:

Interesting insight, I'm fairly certain WSAZ uses WSI, and they pull off the NWS radars and market it as HD Dual Doppler (I really hope they change up the name).. I was just saying It would he nice if WSI/Gray would come up with some updated weather graphics 

There isn’t much you can do to change WSI weather graphics except for changing the colors on the base maps. All stations in Madison uses WSI, WISC used blue for its base map and now it’s gray/black, some stations use white. 

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43 minutes ago, doublejman69 said:

In Wisconsin, WSAW and WMTV looks like they have the latest WSI software while WBAY which Gray has own for only a few years uses some Barron products mostly for severe weather coverage (station owned radar that’s maybe 20 years old) and uses an older version of WSI for day to day weather, some of WBAY’s base weather maps look like they were design for 4:3 and then stretched for 16:9 TV. It will take time for Gray to get that all fixed.  

WBAY took their dome off the roof years ago and has used the Straubel NWS radar since then, along with WGBA (WLUK has their own radar, and WFRV augments the GRB radar with a second Fox Cities radar along I-41). Their weather maps date from Young's HD rollout, and the maps do have stretched exaggeration on the .2 weather station (my county, Sheboygan County, looks more rectangular than its usual square projection on most maps), so your theory does pan out.

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30 minutes ago, mrschimpf said:

WBAY took their dome off the roof years ago and has used the Straubel NWS radar since then, along with WGBA (WLUK has their own radar, and WFRV augments the GRB radar with a second Fox Cities radar along I-41). Their weather maps date from Young's HD rollout, and the maps do have stretched exaggeration on the .2 weather station (my county, Sheboygan County, looks more rectangular than its usual square projection on most maps), so your theory does pan out.

Thanks for the correction I don’t get to watch The Green Bay locals that all that much. It quite noticeable when WBAY switches from Barrons products because the base maps are in the correct aspect ratio and then when they go to WSI some are stretched and then there are some national maps that aren’t, you can even see it more clearly with Dodge County, it’s supposed to square.

 

Edit: looking at WBAY closer it’s clear at least some of the weather maps are not in the correct aspect ratio, it’s looks like someone was fixing it when they went to HD but didn’t get to all of them. For how long WBAY has been in HD it likey won’t get fix until Gray upgrades WBAY’s WSI boxes.

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Thanks for all the info and insight into how and which programs they use, I was curious on that, I guess we'll just have to wait and see how things go, WSAZ graphics are definitely far from the worst, this was some of their augmented reality graphics on their morning newscast 

20211122_071033.jpg

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8 hours ago, Dakota Laughlin said:

Thanks for all the info and insight into how and which programs they use, I was curious on that, I guess we'll just have to wait and see how things go, WSAZ graphics are definitely far from the worst, this was some of their augmented reality graphics on their morning newscast 

20211122_071033.jpg

Brandon actually knows how to use these weather systems and isn't afraid to try things. Some mets are super conservative with that kind of thing.

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2 hours ago, qunewsguy said:

Brandon actually knows how to use these weather systems and isn't afraid to try things. Some mets are super conservative with that kind of thing.

Yes I agree, he did well designing the new weather graphics that debuted a few months ago 

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