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A new and considerable upgrade of FX-Net with version 3.2 beta is the AFOS text browser. The text browser makes it possible now to view text products; and in addition to FX-Net's current capabilities, makes it a much more in-depth package. Some example text products include:
NWS
Forecasts/Discussions
Severe Weather Watches/Warnings
METAR Reports
Weather Summaries/Tables
The
Text Browser actually consists of two seperate windows: The Text
Product Browser and the AFOS Browser.
In short, you first open the Text Product Browser from FX-Net's 
menu, then open the AFOS Browser from the Text Product Browser. The
AFOS Browser is the interface where you will select products to load
into the Text Product Browser window. More detail regarding this process
follows.
To
open the Text Product Browser, select
from the main FX-Net window, and then Text Browser. This will
open the Text Product Browser where you will load and view the text
products. An example Text Product Browser is below.
NOTE: In order to load text products into the Text Product Browser window, you must use the AFOS Browser. The AFOS Browser can be opened two ways: using the button on the toolbar of the Text Product Browser, or by selecting File -> AFOS Browser... from the Text Browser menu bar.
In the File menu of the Text Browser, you will also find actions to Export text to a file, and to Close the Text Browser.
You may Export (or save) the contents of the Text Browser to a file by selecting Export from the File menu. The default location the file is saved (if FX-Net is on C: on your computer) is C:\FX-Net\export. This, of course, may be modified when you save the image. You should append .txt to the filename to save the data as a text file, or any other compatible file format.
The menu bar also has an Options menu, which has one option, to clear or not clear AFOS Browser commands on load. The AFOS Commands can be seen in the bottom left of the Text Product Browser window.
On the toolbar, clicking Load History will give a list of the last 15 products that have been loaded, and will allow you to re-load them without using the AFOS Browser.
WMO Search allows you to search for available products. You may search three ways: by WMO TTAAii, by CCCC, or by using both. You would enter either code in the bottom right boxes of the Text Browser and select WMO Search. The TTAAii code would go in the first box, while the CCCC code would go in the far right box. The results of the search of a TTAAii would show all of those type of products from every location; where a WMO Search of a CCCC would show you all report types from a specific location. You would find a specific report from a specific location by using both TTAAii and CCCC. A quick discussion of these WMO headers follows just below.
Accum is a check box that when checked, will allow you to accumulate text products in the Text Browser. When not checked, newly loaded products will over-write ones that are present in the Text Browser.
Clear will clear all text products from the Text Product Browser, and lastly, the WMO TTAAii CCCC: boxes at the bottom right show the AFOS Product Identifier Label (PIL) of the product that was last loaded. Follow this link to a list of AFOS PIL's and Associated Products from the NWS.
TTAAii
where TT is product type, such as AB for weather text summaries, or SA for surface observations (METARs);
where AA is the region of the origin of the report, such as AK for Alaska, or US for the United States;
and where ii is the report number.
CCCC
where CCCC is the 4 letter station identifier of the source of the report; such as KDSM for Des Moines, IA or KDEN for Denver, Colorado.
To view an extensive list of text products referenced by TTAAii, see the NOAAPORT Text Data Description from Unisys. For a list of CCCC identifiers, see the NWS CCCC Identifiers List.
After you open the Text Product Browser, you need to open the AFOS Browser to access the data. This is described above. When you open the AFOS Browser, you will see the window shown below.
First,
select the area you need data from by selecting a region from the Origin
option menu. The options are: West, Central, East and International.
Once you select a region, the list of stations from the selected region
will load in the Node scroll list on the left. If you are unsure
of what station a 3-letter code represents, click the question mark icon
to the right of the Node title, and a drop down menu will open
with a full title of each station that is visible in the scroll menu.
Next,
select a type of product from the Class option menu. The options
for the Class menu are: Public,
Aviation, Hydrology,
Local Obs., Radar/Upper
Air, Watch/Warning,
Fire Wx Air Poll.,
Agriculture,
Marine, Administrative,
Miscellaneous,
National Guidance,
Natl/Regl/Aviation,
Severe Local Storm,
National Obs.,
Narr/Disc./Codes,
Tables/Summaries
and Hurricane/Tropical.
Once you select a product type from the Class menu, the product
type list will load in the Category scroll list. Once again, if
the 3-letter product types are cryptic to you, click the question mark
icon
to the right of the Category title, and a drop down menu will list
what each product is that is visible in the Category scroll menu.
You may also use the links to each Class type above for an online
list of the Class Categories.
Once
you select a Node and Category, if there are any available
products, you will see them load in the Designator menu. At this
point, if you wish to load the product in the Text Browser Window, you
select the product under Designator and either click Load and
Continue or Load and Close. Load and Continue will load the
product and keep the AFOS Browser open, and Load and Close will load the
product and close the AFOS Browser.