Hi Karl,
Thank you very much for helping to sort out this issue. It is really good to see the hourly data made available on the GTS. However, I noticed that yesterday (28th Nov), the 18UTC period defaulted again to 3 hours in most of the stations (see the image below for station 0-20000-0-96933). I hope it's just a temporary drop. I'll check again tomorrow to see if the problem persists.
Thanks,
Cristina