New Weather Station for WebsterWeather.com

This weekend I helped my Dad replace his four year old Davis Vantage Pro weather station in Webster. This is the hardware that feeds weather data to WebsterWeather.com. It was being replaced because of a low battery condition received from the ISS (integrated sensor suite - it's the brains of the station, which includes temperature and humidity sensors, a rain collector, and a plug for the anemometer, along with the transmitter that beams the data to a receiver in the basement). All this gadgetry is powered by a solar panel by day. During cloudy days and at night, the weather station kicks over to an internal battery. We had replaced the original battery last fall as preventative maintenance. Davis has said hat three years on one battery is more than we should expect, and with our luck, the station would die just after the first snowfall and we wouldn't have been able to take the station off the roof for repair until spring.

When we replaced the battery last fall, the weather station was cleaned, a couple of wasp nests were removed (the occupants weren't home at the time), and I noticed that there was a lot of corrosion on both battery terminals. The original battery looked to be in good shape, but the terminals were looking pretty rough. I didn't have time to look up the best method clean up the rust, especially because of the proxmitity to the circuit board, so I left well enough alone. It was powering up via battery with the new battery, so we reassembled and put it back on the roof.

There was one fatal flaw with this plan: I replaced the orignal battery with a Radio Shack 3 volt lithium battery (CR123, Radio Shack part #23-155)... I should have known we would have problems with it. It's the curse of Radio Shack... the same curse I've had with Radio Shack since I was 15. The stuff I buy from there seems to last 1/4 of the time I expect it to... but that's another rant I'll save for another time.

Starting in January, the ISS started reporting a "low battery" condition at night and during some very cloudy days... basically, when there wasn't enough sunlight to power the station and it had to fall back battery power, it was reporting low voltage. Then finally a few weeks ago, the IIS decided to go to sleep one night and stopped sending data. The next morning when there was enough sun, it woke up and all was normal. I have to do some Googling tonight to see if this Radio Shack lithium battery model is known for disappointing performance.

Out with the old, in with the 2...

We replaced the old Vantage Pro with a new Davis Vantage Pro 2 Plus. Davis reengineered the whole ISS housing, and it looks to be much more weatherproof. It's a slide-off front, with a nice black gasket providing a weathertight seal. It looks like they are learning from their mistakes of previous ISS designs. Also, the 2 Plus adds a UV and solar radiation sensors, so a more accurate "real feel" temperature can be displayed during the summer months, as can a UV index for those fair-skinned folks.

Also installed on the mast this weekend was a new Diamond Discone D130J wideband antenna for my Dad's scanner radio. The Discone was replacing a scanner antenna that must be at least 20 years old. I suspect it wasn't offering much help in pulling in stuff above 512MHz. I tuned around the band a little bit with my Yaesau VX-5R, and admittedly, I didn't directly compare signal strengths between the old antenna and the new Discone. But between the better pattern and RG-8 feedline that was used, I was expecting much better performance.

I honestly wasn't all that impressed with what repeaters I was able to hit around the area on 2 meters or 440. But listening to the scanner during the afternoon, I noticed it was able to pull in some of the rigs and portables in the city of Rochester that wasn't getting heard before.

Still to go: I need to revamp the ASP scripts that drive WebsterWeather.com - Hopefully I'll have that site put back together by my self-imposed Noon dealine today

Update 4/14/2005 @ 1p: My Dad is reporting a loss of communication between the new Vantage Pro 2 and the Virtual Weather Station PC software. He's using the serial cable and VWS v12.07p24. It looks like Ambient has been busy fixing bugs in their software introduced by the Vantage Pro 2 hardware. I'll try and upgrade to p41 tonight to see if it fixes the VWS lockups. Also, he says the new Diamond Discone D130J scanner antenna has made a huge difference in what he's able to pick up, especially on VHF lowband (46MHz). Yates and Wayne County Fire now coming in crystal clear. He's also able to pick up a few more City of Rochester Fire rigs on VHF (154MHz), but hasn't mentioned any difference on UHF.