[TowerTalk] Weather station recommendations esp wind direction and speed?

[Kimberly Elmore]

 Yes! I forgot about Peet Bros. Their instruments are well made. I had one of their stations and liked it very much. The best part was, because it is wired, it had a heated rain gauge! It may sound silly until we want to know how much liquid water is in snow, ice pellets, or freezing rain as it falls. Peet Bros. also uses one of the most interesting rain gauges I've seen: it counts calibrated drops that fall though a set orifice. Electrodes sense each drops as it passes between them. It's both ingenious and free of the under-catch bias that tipping-spoon and tipping-bucket gauges suffer. I liked their display the best, too. But, the wired part was what forced me to change. Critters constantly chewed through the wires and it became a maintenance headache. It was also immune to RFI (as are both the Davis and Ambent instruments).
If you can maintain the wired integrity, Peet Bros. is very good. 
A caution about the wind sites listed: Windy uses model data and will not capture small scale effects. The other site uses some sort of objective analysis function applied to aviation (METAR) wind observations. This also won't capture small-scale effects that I think the original poster is after.
Mesowest is a wonderful site and has extensive archives. CWOP (Citizen Weatehr Observer Program) also has non-Federal data from thousands of people all over the US. These data are QCed, weighted, and used for numerical weather prediction model initialization fields. 
Kim N5OP. 
    On Monday, February 25, 2019, 9:59:26 PM CST, Don <w7wll at arrl.net> wrote:  
 
 And then there is Peet, an often overlooked but simple and reliable 
company that has been selling wx systems for many years.Those 
participating in the OCRG Coast wx reporting system 
(http://www.ocrg.org/telemetry_feed/ocrgwx.html) are all Peet equipped. 
All stations feed into the MesoWest system.

I needed a system that would withstand the harsh salt air environment 
I'm in and be easy to maintain when necessary. The only con for some is 
Peet is not wireless. Mine has been in place since around 2003.

As Kim obliquely points out, Peet, Davis and most of the others are not 
those used by NOAA/NWS and other commercial wx reporting companies. 
Young and others of the commercial range are far more reliable, 
accurate, and expensive.

If one is interested in the NWS standards than you might want to have 
FCM-H1-2005, the NOAA Federal Meteorological Handbook on hand, lots of 
good information.

Price is what you pay, value is what you receive.

Don W7WLL

(Yachats/AS531 on the above OCRG site)

<http://www.ocrg.org/telemetry_feed/ocrgwx.html>

On 2/25/2019 6:39 PM, Kim Elmore wrote:
> I'll add that as a research meteorologist, weather instruments are 
> sort of a "thing" for me. Davis makes nice instrument sets, but sells 
> each instrument separately, which makes it all more expensive but much 
> more flexible in optimal placement. For example, most of us don't live 
> 10 m above the ground and have more interest in air temperature/dew 
> point at no more than 2 m above the ground.
>
> I have a friend (another ham) that uses an Ambient weather station. It 
> seems to hold up well and is accurate as any of the others for 
> temperature, dew point/RH, pressure, and wind-speed/direction.
>
> My Vantage Vue needed to have the anemometer element replaced after a 
> few years because the bearings wore out, nut its very easy to do.
>
> Some good reviews can be found at http://weatherstationexpert.com/. 
> Similar reviews may also be found at 
> https://www.weatherstationadvisor.com/.
>
> Should money be no object and should you insist on research quality 
> instrumentation, we use R. M. Young  instruments for most of our field 
> projects. And you thought high-end transceivers were expensive...
>
> Kim N5OP
>
>
> On 2/25/2019 6:54 PM, Kim Elmore wrote:
>> Davis makes good instruments. I have a Davis Vantage Vue: wireless 
>> spread spectrum. Needs battery replaced every year or so, but 
>> otherwise pretty tough.
>>
>> Kim N5OP
>>
>> "People that make music together cannot be enemies, at least as long 
>> as the music lasts." -- Paul Hindemith
>>
>>> On Feb 25, 2019, at 18:17, Jim Miller <jim at jtmiller.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> At my new QTH in Mt Airy MD I've become much more interested in wind 
>>> speed
>>> and direction.
>>>
>>> It really howls here in general and I'm in the open on a hilltop so 
>>> it's
>>> worse here than generally reported.
>>>
>>> I'd like to get something I could put out to get a better indication of
>>> what is really happening right at my antennas.
>>>
>>> Suggestions welcomed.
>>>
>>> 73
>>>
>>> jim ab3cv
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