Log of problems, updates, and notes of weather station operation

April 25, 2007: Davis sent a replacement reed switch (and also a debris screen) for the Vantage Pro’s rain collector, and I got it installed Monday 4/23. The station picked up today’s rainfall quite accurately, I believe. I am very pleased with Davis’ support on this problem—they were very prompt to respond, and even sent the little items at no charge to facilitate the repair without delay. The small amount of rainfall recorded Monday 4/23 was due to my repair and testing—no rain actually fell then.

April 18, 2007: after many months of nearly trouble-free operation, the weather station failed to record significant rainfall last weekend (April 13-15). Probably 1.5” or so fell. Today I investigated and found that a magnetic reed switch that senses when the rain collector should send another 0.01” increment has failed. I’ll have to obtain a new one to repair the rain collector. The database shows that 0.03” fell today, and that is incorrect; it was a nice sunny day! My testing simply produced some false data pulses. Before this failure, the only problem I’ve had with the rain collector recently has been bird droppings partially clogging it up at times, slowing down the reported rain time and rate.

October 25, 2005: I have returned to using the Davis WeatherLink program for the weather station’s software. Weather Display (described below) had some issues that bugged me, and just recently an independent developer—Brad Smith, VE3BSM—has developed an add-in module to provide the data file for APRS beaconing. Great job, Brad, doing something that Davis should have done all along!

October 23, 2005: I separated the “Integrated Sensor Suite” (ISS, Davis’ name for the sensor package for temperature, humidity, and rainfall) from the windspeed and direction unit. The windspeed and direction unit is still housed 25’ above ground, where it should be to accurately read the wind parameters. The ISS is now mounted 5’ above ground, where it can more accurately sense temperature and humidity. And, maybe I can clean that pesky rain sensor more often now! I think that’s been the problem with rain measurement. But we’ve had so little rain in October that it doesn’t much matter this month. Anyway, hopefully we’ll soon know if rainfall values can be trusted. Rainfall amounts from August 6 to October 23 cannot be trusted, as mentioned below.

August 26, 2005: the weather station took a lightning hit on Saturday August 6, about 1:50PM during a sudden thunderstorm. Damage included a blown serial port on the computer, and the power company transformer that feeds the house was even blown. We had 2.2” of rain that afternoon, according to my non-electronic rain gauge; I haven’t been able to get the weather station to report this, or to let me manually correct the data. The computer was off until Monday August 8 at about 2:30PM. So data integrity for this period of time is poor. I am now updating the web page regularly again, but the electronic rain gauge is reading well under what the glass gauge shows; so don’t trust my rainfall reporting until this problem is solved. For several weeks I used the other serial port, which had been used to feed the APRS radio, to keep the web page going; so was not transmitting weather information by APRS until today. Today I installed a dual serial board, and everything seems to be back to normal.

March 18, 2005: the software for the weather station was changed. I had originally used the Davis WeatherLink program that I purchased with the weather station. It was mostly satisfactory, but there were some annoying bugs, and it was incapable of providing a data file for APRS beaconing (see main page for more on APRS). So I have changed to Weather Display. So far it seems to be working fine; it appears to be much more versatile. The author’s spelling and grammar isn’t perfect—but the program does what it says it will do! It’s pretty intuitive (and good setup guidance is provided too), so I haven’t had to ask for assistance for it yet; but I can tell you that Davis’ support of WeatherLink was very weak, so it almost HAS to be better than what I was experiencing. One disappointment in the changeover has been a loss of over a year’s worth of local data, as I have been unable to import that into Weather Display.

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