To the editor: I am writing about the excellent article, "Now and future weather tools," (Issue 117 Sept./Oct. 2001) written by Ben Ellison in which I am especially interested, as my company represents Mscan Meteo software. Since our product was not mentioned in the article (middle of page 74), I would like the opportunity to inform your readers of CombiTech's Mscan Meteo (www.mscanmeteo.com) software for demodulating weather fax, Navtex, and Telex/RTTY signals. The software requires no additional hardware, as it uses the computer's sound card to process the incoming signal or can be interfaced with the SCS PTC-IIe, which many of our clients use for at-sea email. Though CombiTech's (www.mscan.com) main market consists of pleasure cruisers, it does have a few commercial ships using Mscan Meteo. In particular, the captain/owner of the m/s Polar Snow (web.inter.nl.net/users/polarsnow), a 3800-ton ship, recently wrote: "We have been using Mscan Meteo for half a year now, mainly in the Northern Scandinavia area, and are very satisfied. The program receives charts, transmitted by certain stations, in the background, and we examine received charts using a network and a viewer program. "This program is many times more useful to us than the old-fashioned weatherfax machines using thermal paper, and it certainly helps us in our effort to create a paperless bridge. The costs are easily earned back by our savings on (thermal) paper." Alan Jean-Joyce is the North American agent for the Holland-based Mscan Meteo
