I've just about finished the long and tedious task of getting my weather station completed. Several folks have toured my site and several have mentioned that I need to include some photos, so here it is;
My station is located on my private airstrip on my ranch in Texas. It sits about 1/2 mile from my house. I use a Davis Vantage Pro2 as my primary weather data source. For software I recently switched to Weather Display and I have coded my own webpage in just plain HTML. It's simple and it works. The Weather Display software is very detailed and very flexible in it's capabilities, and I am happy so far, as it seems stable on my equipment.
The tower is roughly 40 feet high and it has mounted the windsock, the anemometer, and the Ubiquity Nano-station that connects to the computer back at the house. I have split up the ISS into separate components and the main ISS board sits on the tower about 15ft. high. Amazingly it transmits 1/2 mile through the trees and obstructions to the console at the house with a reception of around 94% year round.
I built the Stevenson Screen housing from a window shutter. Inside you can see the Davis temp/humidity sensor. I have a wet and dry lab grade thermometer set but it has not been permanently installed yet on the rack inside. I would love to find a clock style barometer to put inside also. The screen was not difficult to build and it does it's job well. I ran some extensive comparison tests with the sensors inside and out and compared the readings to the lab thermometers and it does definitely make the Davis equipment more stable and accurate. The cable length from the sensor to the ISS board is about 35 feet and no issues have occurred.
I also separated the Davis rain gauge and built my own Alter shield. I used a galvanized ring from an old fishing net and the blades are plastic gutter downspout that I ripped on my table saw. The biggest issue so far has been with my cows messing with it out of curiosity I suppose.
The webcam gets it's power and net link from a rather complicated solar power setup that I designed and built. Most of my home is solar powered and I built that several years ago, so I figured that I would build a mini system for the camera. The Ubiquity equipment and the camera are both running off of 12vDC and this is stabilized by using a buck style converter after the charge controller. The batteries are gel cell and the whole setup will run for 4 days and nights of no sunshine. I've yet to have a shutdown, as even on cloudy days the battery gets a full charge. The whole setup only pulls .5 amps so there is plenty of reserve power for rainy weather. The stainless box I found in a local scrap yard. It was originally a traffic signal box and it's well made, waterproof, and has a vent fan built in. I got lucky when I found that!
You can see the web page live at
http://www.texasriverdata.com/weather/wx.html and watch my cows destroy the Alter Shield in their spare time on the web cam!
Bud
