by Jonathan Spencer

Cell phones are rapidly becoming the universal communications device–you can use your phone to make calls, take and send photographs, access the Web and send text messages. So why not use it to get aviation weather? A number of sources offer just this service for enabled phones.

But are they all practical? We tried several weather-by-phone services to see how well they deliver aviation weather. We did some of the testing during Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Tropical Depression Charley’s passage up the east coast, so we had numerous opportunities to test NEXRAD capabilities of the services. We also did much of our testing near a desktop computer with a broadband connection and…