Switching to SkywarnPlus-NG: A Smarter Weather Alert System for My Repeater

The Problem

For a while, severe weather alerting on my repeater ran on my own fork of SkywarnPlus—itself forked from a project that had gone unmaintained. It worked, but I was the one keeping it patched, and it only really covered basic NWS alerts through Pushover notifications. Meanwhile, SkywarnPlus-NG—a from-scratch rewrite by hardenedpenguin (Jory Pratt)—had grown into something a lot more capable: a real web dashboard, earthquake and other geo-hazard alerting alongside the usual severe weather, GPS-based forecast zones, and a pace of development I couldn’t keep up with maintaining my own version. At some point it stopped making sense to keep patching mine when a better one already existed.

What I Did

I installed SkywarnPlus-NG on my node straight from Jory’s repo and built a small bridge—ASL3-SkywarnPlus-NG-Bridge—to keep it talking to the same dashboards I already use to run the repeater:

  • Feeds NG’s live alert data into the Allmon3 panel visitors already see
  • Writes the classic warnings.txt file so Supermon’s AUTOSKY panel keeps working too
  • AllStarLink Herald now reads NG’s own tail-message audio directly, so active alerts still interrupt the regular tail message rotation exactly like before
  • Archived my old fork with a note pointing anyone who finds it to the real upstream project
  • Try It Yourself

    If you’re running AllStarLink and want a much more capable weather and geo-hazard alerting system than the original SkywarnPlus, credit goes to hardenedpenguin for the rewrite—go check out the real thing. Here’s the bridge I built, if you want to see how I wired it into Allmon3 and Supermon:

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