What some of the things in po-locations stand for/mean

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

In the hope that this list saves some time, things I have learned 
doing gnome-applets/po-locations stuff, which might help new teams 
who have not yet really started that file. 

  * Tons of these locations came from airports.

  * There are three categories of airports: Military, Civil and Private.
    Abbreviations like Mil-Civ are abbreviations of these terms.

  * AFB stands for Air Force Base. It is _usually_ an American one, I
    think. (There's a FAFB which is a French Air Force Base and there
    used to be a ROK-AFB for Republic of Korea, I think, but they're
    exceptions.) USAF is US Air Force.

  * AB is Air Base. "Ab" is AB, lower-cased. It is not part of a place
    name. I do not know whether there is a difference between Air Base
    and Air Force Base for the purposes of translation. 

  * I think NWS is the United States' "National Weather Service".

  * NEXRAD is the NEXt generation RADar service. Which is the reason
    I went through capitalising it. I started off by thinking Nexrad was
    a place, until I met the fourth Nexrad in a row, and got suspicious.

  * MAPS stands for Modular Acquisition Processing System. (Automated
    weather stations installed in the 1980s.)

  * MARS stands for Meteorological Automatic Reporting System. (older
    than MAPS.)

  * AWRS (and Awrs) stand for Automatic/Automated Weather Reporting
    System/Station. (I am not sure which of the alternatives are the
    right ones.) There are about 30 variations on this theme.

  * "Light" in these strings _usually_ means "lighthouse", "light vessel"
    (a ship with a big light on it) and "unmanned lights" (no lighthouse
    keeper). It does not usually mean "the opposite of heavy".

  * "Lightstation" is not in the online dictionaries, but seems to be
    Canadian for both lighthouses and unmanned lights.

  * There are entire societies devoted to lighthouses.

  * The string "Central" on its own is a placename in Alaska and not a
    description, so you don't need to translate it. 

  * "High Level" is also a placename, so ditto. 

  * "Nlle" is an abbreviation of "Nouvelle" (in Canadian placenames)

  * There was a system set up as an early warning (of invasion and 
    missiles, I presume) system which had a string of monitoring 
    stations across the north of America. This was the 
    "Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line", which explains the 
    "Distant Early Warning" string from Barter Island. (Cape Peel West
    is another in this line, incidentally.)

  * A really good site for working out which part of a string is the
    area/town and which is the name of the airport is
    http://www.aircraft-charter-world.com/airports/
    
I have also learned huge quantities of geography, history and a touch
of politics. :) 

I still have no idea what CS is. I am guessing at Coastal Station, 
Coastguard Station, or Coast Something. Suggestions?

In fact, I have quite a list of "I don't know", and they are annoying
me. They can come in another mail!

Telsa