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Re: [TowerTalk] Wired Anemometer for Tower?

To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Wired Anemometer for Tower?
From: Jim Lux <jimlux@earthlink.net>
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 18:59:05 -0700
List-post: <towertalk@contesting.com">mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>
On 4/29/14, 5:08 PM, Al Kozakiewicz wrote:
I'm not going to belabor the point.  Wind speed is derived by measuring the 
change in rotational position divided by time.   The shorter the sampling 
interval (time), the lower the measurement accuracy. There is no reason for 
this to controversial.


not true. Consider a frequency counter in your shack. You can have a particular gate time and count positive zero crossings during that gate. For this simple scheme, yes, short measurement gate means low precision.

But instead, if you do a ratiometric counter, and count the length of time it takes for N cycles, then compute the frequency by N/(time duration), you can potentially more accuracy. Then your accuracy depends on how good your time stamps are.


For low frequency signals (e.g. 1 pps from a GPS) doing "time measurements" is almost always better than doing "frequency measurements"


Same with the anemometer. If I get 8 pulses/rev and it's spinning at 1 rev per second, and I count for 1 second, then sure, my uncertainty is 0.125 count.

But if I hook up my 10 MHz clock and count the time between pulses, my accuracy is +1/-0 count out of 1,250,000 counts. That's a whole lot more accurate. (actually, i'd worry more about the mechanical accuracy of the thing making the pulses at that point).

In any case, getting 1% accuracy on rotation rate is easy.

Other effects will be much larger.


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