Tap anywhere
The whole scope is the button. Tap it to step through 10, 25, 50 and 100 miles, then the loop views. No tiny icons, no menus, gloves on.
The story
How FXR Radar was made for riders
A radar you can read at a glance
Most weather apps are made for someone on the couch with bare hands and time to read. FXR Radar was made for the saddle. You get one big round radar scope in glowing green, like an old phosphor screen. A beam sweeps around every 30 seconds and paints the newest radar behind it. Older returns fade out slowly, so the picture always looks alive.
Tap anywhere on the scope to change the range: 10, 25, 50 or 100 miles. Keep tapping and you get loop views that replay the last 30 minutes in a second and a half, then hold the newest picture for another second and a half. One look at a light shows you which way the weather is heading. The loops stay centered on you as you ride.
Built for gloves and short looks
- Glove-size controls. The whole scope is one big tap target, and the readout pills are about 76 pixels tall.
- Big text only. Nothing on the main screen is smaller than about 26 pixels. The fine print lives in Help.
- Miles to rain. The rain pill shows how far it is to the nearest real rain inside your range, with an arrow pointing at it. It says HERE when you are in it. The faint night echo from birds and bugs doesn't count.
- Heading Up. Flip it on and the map turns so the road ahead is up. Below about 3 mph it holds your last heading, so the map doesn't spin at a light. A red N always points north.
- Wind that makes sense. The wind arrow points downwind and turns with the scope.
- Daylight left. A sun pill counts down to sunset or sunrise, so you know how much light is left for the ride home.
- Quiet until it matters. GPS starts by itself. Big red warnings only show up when something is wrong, like GPS being off.
Lightning, with honesty
On the US mainland the scope also shows lightning seen by NOAA's GOES weather satellites. Strikes flash as white crosses and fade over about two and a half minutes, and a bolt tag shows the miles to the nearest one. That data runs a minute or two behind, and the app says so plainly: if you see lightning or hear thunder, get off the road safely.
A map that stays out of the way
Faint green highways, highway numbers, town names and lakes sit under the radar, with interstates brightest. Local streets were left out on purpose. They would eat cell data and clutter the scope, and you already have a map app for turn by turn. Want a bare scope? Switch highways off in Help.
How it was made
FXR Radar was built for FXR Archive the same way as the Phone Dyno: a free web app that runs in Safari and goes on the iPhone Home Screen, with a built-in guide for adding it. There is no account to make.
The radar picks the sharpest free source for each range. At 10 and 25 miles it uses the single nearest NEXRAD radar, about twice as sharp as the national picture. At 50 and 100 miles it switches to the national composite, and outside the US it uses RainViewer. Weather and elevation come from Open-Meteo, and the map lines come from the US Census Bureau.
It runs on free public services with no guarantee, so treat it as a helper, not a rule. It is not for navigation or safety decisions. Use your eyes, check the sky, and ride your own ride.
