Topic: Ambient/CWOP data stale.

[OldAlaskaGuy]

For the past week, I have been getting messages that my CWOP data is stale only to get a notice that it is active one minute later. Nothing has changed. I see no lost data.

[galfert]

You aren't uploading to CWOP directly. You are using the AmbientCWOP.com service (which is not owned nor operated by Ambient nor by CWOP).
This service relies on Ambientweather.net being up and functional for your data.
Ambientweather.net is known to have temporary hick-ups and times when your data is not available (even if for just a short brief duration). They are a new service and they are growing fast.
Therefore AmbientCWOP.com is not able to process its data acquisition to upload to CWOP.

If your Internet service is not the issue then the likely culprit is Ambientweather.net is what I'm saying. So be sure to also rule out and ensure that your Internet is reliable. The easiest way to determine this is to see if other places that your station directly uploads to are or aren't also missing data. I realize that you aren't missing data on CWOP. So perhaps this isn't the best test.  Another think you can do is when this next happens see if Ambientweather.net is available. And of course this also is not the perfect test because the Ambientweather.net website service and their API are possibly two distinct things. Perhaps contacting Danoh is the best recourse.

If this becomes problematic for you and you want to do something more proactive about it then I suggest investing in a more direct way to upload to CWOP, like for example using Cumulus MX, Meteobridge, Weather-Display, or WeeWX software.

[galfert]

Now that I think about this even further...AmbientCWOP.com also needs to be up and reliable (their servers and their Internet presence). As you can see any link in the chain can cause the outage that you are experiencing.

From my experience though I think Ambientweather.net is the more likely suspect, and unfortunately that means that it is out of your control. Which is why I recommend getting rid of that link in the chain and go direct via your own software. I suppose it is also possible that there is a minor bug in AmbientCWOP.com and something that Dan can take a look at. I recommend reaching out to him so that he can further investigate.

The AmbientCWOP.com service is a really nice convenience and it was really nicely designed and created by Dan, requiring no extra hardware nor software and no added cost (although I recommend donating to Dan). I've even helped Dan with a few details. But every system has its Achilles heel. Even if you run your own hardware/software then that becomes a system that then becomes your responsibility to maintain. If you end up putting one of the software packages on some less than reliable hardware then you'll likely suffer outages then too. It is a trade-off, self control or relying on others. It is good to have choices.

[OldAlaskaGuy]

I received a reply from Ed at AW and he can not help. I also sent an email to Dan and a donation. Hoping that he can shed some light on it. All was well until sometime last week. I will look into another way to send data. I am getting ready to move to Alaska so everything will shut down and reconfigured once the move is complete most likely sometime in August or September.

[GHammer]

CWOP was having issues with at least one server. Reported in weewx groups for one.
Seems they have corrected this, but some are still using a known good server at CWOP for reporting.

I've seen no issues FWIW.

[galfert]

That is an unrelated issue for AmbientCWOP.com users. There are two sets of CWOP APRS servers to use. There is rotate.aprs.net and there is cwop.aprs.net. The rotate.aprs.net is where the issues have recently been reported and that set of servers is only for use for those that have registered ham radio call signs. The servers that AmbientCWOP.com uses are cwop.aprs.net and that is why they are not affected by the issue you mentioned. That is not to say that sometimes cwop.aprs.net can't have issues also.

Both of those mentioned addresses randomly select from a set group of servers.