Weather Station Hardware > Other Weather Station Hardware
Should I buy a brand new Vaisala WXT510 for $400 from estate sale????
jas340:
Is this station any good?? It is brand new in the box. It was manufactured in 2008 but never installed. How hard/expensive would it be to put this "on the air" as only the main unit is for sale. No cables. Thanks
jas340:
I just bought it for $300.00 US :grin: or #-o ?
DaleReid:
That's even better yet, 25% off.
Quite a deal, if it is either new in box or pretty well cared for.
You can get a cable from Camp Scientific which won't be dirt cheap but at least have all the power, ground, and data wires to hook up.
Please let us know if you decide to sell it! :-)
Only partially kidding, these seem to be rare, so there may be only a few folks here who can help you with the intricacies. From what I understand they are pretty well made (Vaisala quality) and have seen rough service on yachts etc.
Do you have a good setup to interface to see the output stream from the RS-232? Something like ttermpro or such? That or a data logger that you can program but not as easy to see output stream and tweak it. The other possibility is a RM Young translator that you can program to get the data stream parsed and then save the data to where you want it and then send it to a PC running Weather Display. I don't think Brian has interfaced a Vaisala, but check his list since it may have been added in the last few months or so.
If you get it up and running, please put together a report on it especially if there were any tricky parts you ran into that others might stumble or could benefit from your report.
jas340:
If you look at my recent posts you will see I have been lusting after a professional Weather Station. $3800.00 for a top of the line Lufft!!!!....not happening. I went on ebay and a guy was asking $950.00CAD OBO for a NIB WXT510. On a lark I gave him an offer of $150. We went back and forth. I wanted to pay $300.00 US max so I did the conversion to CAD and that was my final offer. I did not expect it to be accepted!!! I got my Christmas present!!!
I know that WD does support this model. As far as getting it on the air???? I am a plug and play kind of guy. I will need to do a lot of research first.
My interest in weather was rekindled thanks to WU coming apart at the seems and my need to get my own wx website. Fun? Yes. But I have been investing a lot of money in this hobby the last month or so.
DaleReid:
Congratulations on the persistence in back and forth negotiations.
If WD does accept this model (and some have different output strings, but Brian usually works with serious users to get his interface driver working, he was very helpful with some Texas Wx Instruments station variations I had), then you are almost there. Really.
If you are plug and play, then you might call Campbell Scientific to see if they still have the cable to attach to this unit to get the interface working, at least. I know these professional units come with university and NASA budget prices. I needed a simple plug for the bottom of a Met One 34B wind head and it was list something like $80! I finally found one on the end of a 100' cable on eBay for about $50 which was what the cable without the plug would have cost locally.
Nonetheless, if you haven't done so, please check out Jachym's Meteotemplate program which is extremely professional in appearance, to my eye, and again very very configurable. His stuff is free to use, but he depends upon donations to keep the lights on. It is at a very high level polished state right now, and Weather Display will send data to your SQL seamlessly.
The trick may be to get the RS-232 output from the station to a DB-9, then a serial to USB cable to get it into your computer.
I've been a fan of WD for years and while there are some tricks in getting it set up, there are now some relative step by step setups to follow to make sure the sometimes not-intuitive check boxes on several pages are correctly set. That being said my system has been plugging away for years.
You can let WD put up a web page of it's own making and partially your design, or do further and add something like the Saratoga php stuff which I do not use but I understand is well supported and has a lot of assistance from very enthusiastic users.
I hope I'm not telling you baby steps and you think me the idiot. I was intimidated but powered through and now all is on automatic and I can just sit back and watch the web displayed stuff, or scroll through the raw data on my computer if I'm so inclined.
If you haven't seen what the WD stuff looks like, peer at my modest offering at
http://ECWx.info
and for the same data with tweaks added per Jachym's genius and professional quality programming, look to
http://ECWX.info/t/index.php
Not having participated with WU and hearing some negative things about it over time haven't changed I'm not sure what crashes you allude to, but I like to have my data under my control going to my site, and I think there are a lot of hobbyists out there who feel the same.
Have fun. Get the gizmo fired up on your bench with a computer interfaced to the DB9 port through a usb connector and read the incoming stream and then switch over to letting WD start doing its work. Then set up the database on your own server. I rent space and all from GoDaddy, but there are lots who will also offer their opinion. My traffic is very light with a few other hobbyists in the area, a few hams, and the astronomy group using it, but I never exceed the minimal system I subscribe for service. I think that most folks argue against trying to use a free service since it, and it was my experience, doesn't usually pan out well.
Dale
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