Station Setup - N.W. Phoenix Weather

For some strange reason I have an interest in knowing what the current weather conditions are. Living in Phoenix you wouldn't think the weather would be all that exciting, since it's almost always clear and hot. But that's just the point, if there's any change whatsoever it's pretty exciting.

I had looked at weather stations for several years, but never run across anything that impressed me. In February 2003 a friend mentioned he had purchased a Davis Vantage Pro station. I decided to take a look and bought it on impulse, this is the way I acquire most toys (I mean valuable instruments). After some searching on the web I found the best price at Ambient, I was however, somewhat disappointed to find out they we're located in Arizona (had to pay sales tax). I ended up with the wireless version without solar radiation and UV sensors, they get pretty pricey (don't worry, I'll probably add them before long). The other item that was mandatory was Davis's WeatherLink Software with their Data Logger. When ordering the station from Ambient they throw in a copy of their 'Virtual Weather Station' software for free (didn't really know why I would want it, but it was free). Ordered it on Sunday evening, it arrived on Tuesday. That evening, I stuck it on the side of the house (temporarily), and watched the remote console till after midnight.

Station Installation

I decided to mount the 'Integrated Sensor Suite' (ISS) on the overhang of the back patio, and the anemometer on a mast extending above the peak of the roof. The Vantage Pro comes with 40' of cable for remote mounting of the anemometer, of course I ended up about 5' feet short. Regular telephone wire did the trick. If you follow the strict guidelines for sensor mounting, the ISS is mounted too high. It should be approximately 5' above the ground. In addition, I have some concerns about how close the rain collector is from the roof (we may work on that in the future). At this point it seems to be working fairly well and will probably stay this way for a while.

While Davis has very impressive specs. on the range of their wireless station, don't expect anywhere close to the range they state. The range is greatly limited by the number of walls between the ISS and the console. In my case I experience about 75% packet loss when trying to go through two walls. If I move the console to a room (with a window) is see only about 1% loss. This is a bit of a problem, especially if you want to connect the console to you're PC. In my case I would have to put everything on the kitchen table (wife would not be happy).

PC Interface

It was fairly disappointing that the VantagePro doesn't include a PC interface in the base price. Even more disappointing is the cost to add on their Data Logger. After trying out both the David WeatherLink software and the Ambient VWS software, I finally settled on VWS as my primary PC software package. It still requires the purchase of the Davis Data Logger, but the VWS software has a lot more flexibility.

The next problem that arose, is that the only spare PC I had for the weather station was and old laptop with little processor power or memory. No problem, within about two days I had a nice shinny new PC with a 2.4 ghz processor and 512 mb of memory. I did do a fair amount of looking for PCs, when all was said and done, I purchased from pcclub. Many of the package deals I found, through in a lot of frills I didn't need or want. With pcclub you can pick the parts, and they'll put it together for you. We'll have to wait and see how their service works out.

Web Site

Of course if you have a fancy weather station, you can't just sit around and look at the console all day, you've got to get the information out on the web. Both the software from Davis (WeatherLink) and Ambient (VWS) have capabilities for posting weather data to the web. Unfortunately, the base edition of VWS that was included with the weather station doesn't have any Internet capabilities, so I had to upgrade to the Internet edition. The next problem that arose, was that I didn't have a web site. While the ISP that I use for Internet access, provides limited personal web space, it only took me about a week to realize that the space and bandwidth limitations just wouldn't do, if I was going to provide regular updates (approx. every 10 minutes). So the next challenge was to find a web hosting company that didn't cost a lot. After a fair amount of research (about an hour and a half), I came across Total Choice Hosting. They seem to have a pretty good deal for about $5.00 a month.

We now have a new problem. I have no experience with building web sites. While I work in the computer industry, I have never bothered to look ant anything like HTML. If I could do it in either assembler or C, I'd be ok, but this fancy graphical stuff was new. After about two days of trying to code in HTML, I broke down and bought a copy of Microsoft's Front Page (why does everything cost extra). I figured if I was going to do this web stuff, I might as well learn a tool that I can use for the long run.

Web Site Update March 24, 2003 - Well it's not as easy as it looks, I'm on version 356 of my site building activities. Since the real-time updates are provided by Ambient's VWS and Front Page wants to control all activities of the site, most of my time has been spent battling Front Page (except for the time spent surfing the web trying to steal ideas from other sites).

Web Cam

Web Cam Update March 24, 2003 - Finally got the web cam working (kinda). Don't be too surprised if the image comes and goes. When upgrading to VWS Internet Edition, I purchased a copy of ImageSalsa to process images for the site. I already had a video capture card that was installed when the new PC was purchased and a camera waiting in the box. The video capture card (tv@anywhere by MSI) turned out to be a complete failure. It seems to work fairly well for watching TV on the computer, but I could never get a quality image with any of the video capture software I tried. So here's the current setup:


	Image Capture Card:	Hauppauge 401
	Image Capture Software:	ImageSalsa
	Camera:	Bullet Camera

The good news (if there is any), now I can watch TV and have the Web Cam going at the same time. More experimentation with the camera location will have to be done. I'm currently having a difficult time deciding on how much of the image will be on the sky and how much in the backyard. After all it's Phoenix, on any given day it's clear and sunny.

UV and Solar Radiation

UV and Solar Radiation Update April 5, 2003 - I should have started off with the Davis VantagePro Plus. Adding the UV and Solar Radiation Sensors isn't cheap. You can save about $150 if you buy the Plus in the first place. I ordered the Sensors and support shelf from Ambient on Sunday and received them on Tuesday (pretty good service). The installation was straight forward, following Davis's instructions. The only problem encountered, was the UV Sensor indicates a UV Index reading around 1.2 during the night. I sent an email to Davis asking about this issue. They responded the same day asking for my mailing address so they could send me an updated sensor board and I would have 30 day to return the old board with no charge. The new ISS arrived in four days, this was their new model where the ISS is enclosed in a weather proof housing and mounts outside the radiation shield. Other than the having to completely disassemble the entire station, the change is fairly simple. One of the big advantages of the new ISS is that you can access the connections, battery, etc. without removing the radiation shield. And yes it does seem to have solved the erroneous nighttime UV readings.

Lightening Detection

Real-Time Lighting Detection April 12, 2003 - While looking at other weather stations on the web, trying to learn more about UV and Solar Radiation sensors, I stumbled across several sites with real-time lightning displays. Since I was ordering the UV and Radiation sensors, I might as well be able to detect lightning up to 600 miles away. I ordered the Boltek StormTracker Lightning Detector Lightning/2000™ Bundled Special from Ambient. The installation of this equipment is a bit more complicated than the rest of the components that make up the station. For details of my installation click here.

The software included with the Boltek Lightning detector is fairly sparse in functionality. Most of the on-line detectors I have found add Lightning/2000 (L2K) from Aninoquisi Software Design. The L2K product seems to be fairly complete, it comes with a customized map for you're location. While it took almost no time to get L2K up and running, tuning for best performance will require several storm with lightning. A lot more information can be found in the lightning-detectors form.

This page last updated: 04/14/2003