[TowerTalk] weather station on tower?

[Big Don]

We have been measuring wind here continuously for 40 years -- currently,
for last 2 years, have a 900mhz Davis Vantage Vue Model #6351 wireless
mounted up 25' on a 2-foot arm facing into the direction of peak wind. At
this QTH, all the winds over 40 mph come from the south plus or minus 30
degrees or so.  No RF issues in or out in an HF-KW environment.

Would guess most hams prime interest is in wind speed, particularly
PeakGust which is what can damage towers, antennas, and trees. Wind meter
averages the impeller speed over a short period to compute the displayed
speed. Our Vantage Vue displays 2.5 second averages and calls those
"gusts." This shaves a bit off the real peak.wind. The anemometer we had
originally for 15 years until it wore out (impeller bearing fail )  was an
old Heathkit HD-1590 hardwired - no memory, you had too be watching when
the gust happened or you missed it. Anytime there was a serious windstorm,
we were generally WATCHing. The great feature was it averaged over only one
second which did a good job of capturing the gust peaks.

We are 5 miles south of SeaTac Intl Airport on the same a plateau 400'
above Puget Sound.  SeaTac has a good wx station with all parameters
published on-line every hour including PeakGust. Back pre-internet had to
wait for Evening News, or the newspaper the next day, to get a peak gust
value for comparison. The Heath meter always compared quite closely within
2-3 mph. The Vantage Vue (longer sampling period) appears to be about 20%
low compared to SeaTac published peaks (due to longer sampling time.??). No
bird spikes but our rain measurements agree well with SeaTac.

We had a LaCrosse wireless for awhile, it was worthless, the sampling
period was like 10 seconds, when, indeed, it felt like sampling. No tech
support. Their current models may be better.....

Don  N7EF





On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 6:19 AM, Steve London <n2icarrl at gmail.com> wrote:

> An interesting discussion.
>
> There is no doubt that the Davis weather stations are excellent and
> top-of-the-line. You also pay for that quality.
>
> I live in a very lightning vulnerable location on a ridgetop in southwest
> NM. Over the years, I have had my share of lightning damage to
> tower-mounted weather stations. For that reason, I tend to go with lower
> cost weather stations, and accept that their life expectancy is highly
> random. Until very recently, I was using a LaCrosse, and just recently
> switched to an Acurite. No issues with RFI either to or from the unit. I
> have a common complaint with both - the advertised range from the remote
> unit to the base unit is grossly exaggerated. My experience is that if you
> can get 100 feet, line-of-site, no obstructions, you are doing well. (A
> friend described the range as "75 feet, or two solid walls, whichever comes
> first")
>
> If you are curious about what frequency your weather station is
> transmitting on, or want to look at the signal strength, a
> SDR-receiver-on-a-USB-stick works great. For example, you can get the
> RTL-SDR receiver from multiple sources for under $15. With SDRSharp or
> HDSDR free software, using a waterfall display around 434 MHz, the blips
> from the weather station stand right out. (If you want to see an
> interesting, RF-related project see
> http://www.desert-home.com/2015/02/reading-acurite-5n1-sensor-set-this.html
> . No, this is not my web page, although this guy is amazing, and should be
> a ham !)
>
> 73,
> Steve, N2IC
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> TowerTalk mailing list
> TowerTalk at contesting.com
> http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk
>