I operate 2 weather stations. One here in Eugene and one in
Deadwood off hyw36. They are both Davis Instruments models and run from a server
at each location. The Deadwood station is at a friends home on Deadwood
Creek, a Siuslaw River tributary. My Eugene station located north of Eugene
in Santa Clara and has been collecting data sense 2003 and the Deadwood station from
2008. I'm no meteorologist or weather man but I find it very interesting to
follow it closely. Very prudent for the type of weather we
have here. My web page forecasts come from the NWS so don't hold those
against me.
The stations are issued ID's by
NOAA and
MADIS, idAR232 Eugene, and
idAT060 for
Deadwood. Both stations are running 24/7 uploading their data to the web
and respective web site every minute. And 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. So the station sensors have been sited to 3
different locations on the property to achieve this. First off 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's little
interaction with wind and trees. It's also heated to measure frozen
precipitation. The temp/hum sensor moved to the back 40 where 2 other
large grass yards converge. This location is very good with nothing around like pavement or structures that can generate, or
radiate heat unlike the old location above the roof. Also the
humidity/temperature sensors are located in a fan aspirated radiation
shield to eliminate heat soak. 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 4 miles north of
hyw36. 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 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.
Still waiting to install because red tape. 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.
