Having been involved in Ham radio for over 15 years has led
me to become an owner/ operator of 2 weather stations in Lane County;
one North of Eugene and the other in Deadwood, off Highway 36. Both weather
stations use Davis Instruments and run from a server on site
at each location. The Deadwood station is on private property located on Deadwood
Creek, a Siuslaw River tributary. The North Eugene station is located in
Santa Clara and has been collecting data since 2003. The Deadwood station from
is newer and has been running since 2008. I'm not a meteorologist or weather man, but I follow
weather patterns closely and consider running these websites to be a passion
and personal achievement. The forecasts for my web page come from the NWS.
The stations are issued ID's by
NOAA and
MADIS, idAR232 Eugene, and
idAT060 for
Deadwood. Both stations are running 24/7and are uploading their data to
the web and respective web site every minute as well as every 5 seconds to the
Weather Underground network, which can be seen below on the
imbedded
web-cam images for up to the second resolution.
Relocating the sensors was necessary to acquire quality data and
follow weather station
siting
guidelines; the station sensors have been sited to 3 different locations
on the property to achieve this. First, all of the sensors were removed
from the sensor suite so they could be remotely mounted. The wind
anemometer is mounted above the tree line for reasons obvious. The rain
gauges still sit on the roof where there is little interaction with wind
and trees; It is also heated to measure frozen
precipitation. I would like to thank my
neighbor for letting me put them on his property of almost 4 anchors.
The field is a mostly grass and garden, a perfect environment for the
sensor suite. The fan aspirated radiation shield is solar powered to
eliminate heat soak in the sun. This location is ideal because it has nothing
surrounding it such as pavement or structures that can generate or
radiate heat, unlike the old locations. Virtual Weather Station software is in
charge of collecting the data and inserting the data seamlessly into the
web pages from one of my DL360 servers.
The Anometer is mounted near the top of the tower to avoid interaction with the large trees around here.
This station runs on a HP DL360 server along with many programs.
Davis VantagePro II console, LAN WAN equipment and the APRS radio and TNC can be seen also.
The Deadwood station is located 30 miles west of Eugene
and 4 miles north of
Highway 36. It sits in a narrow creek valley which
eventually flows into the Siuslaw river. This station is a Davis Weather
Monitor II also running VWS on it's server. The sensors are located up
25 feet on the pole donated by the property owner and installed for free
by our good friends at Blatchly Lane electric.
The web-cams are both analog units cabled to GeoVision PCI capture cards
in their servers. The North Eugene web-cam is one from a multi camera system
securing the house. The Deadwood camera is a hi-res Pelco unit and the
Eugene camera is a Costar hi-res with a 10x zoom on a homebrew tilt
base. I will be upgrading resolution soon for both cameras. I also
stream NOAA weather radio from this site to the web and the
Weather
Underground weather radio network. I run IceCast2 and EdCast to
steam the audio from the servers. I use USB adapters (4 on one server!)
to convert the audio to digital. The receivers and USB adapters can be
seen below.
This image was downloaded from NOAA18 passing the west coast on a double
cross antenna at 80', AR2 pre-amp, then a Hamtronics R139 WXfax receiver
at 137Mhz. Updated images will soon be viewable live from my
eugeneweather.net website.
This was built for Blatchly Lane to be sited at Badger mountain.
It is in process of being installed because of red tapeissues. It uses a Oregon Scientific
weather station with a homebrew pagoda radiation shield. Charging is
done through two 5 watt panels feeding a 7.5Ah gel-cell through a small
charging regulator. Communication for this was going to be APRS but I
found a pair of Data-Link 900Mhz serial radios cheap that work great! In
testing I've had success from 5 miles urban, and 20 miles line of site.
The 5 element yagi points to the towers fiberglass omni up 80 feet on
the tower.
Battery taken out for picture.
900Mhz Serial Data Link antenna at 80 feet with 5Db gain.
