Hello everyone, this is Dave Phillips. You can find my picks of the week at skydaver.blogspot.com. I just have two pics this week, because I'm going to spend a bit of time on number one, an update on the LaCrosse weather station.
The rain gauge is decently accurate. I've been comparing it with the CoCoRaHS gauge, mounted right next to it, and it's good enough. I think, but don't have an easy way to check, that the temp & humidity gauges are also good enough.
Overall, I give the unit a C+. The plus part of the grade is because of the price, $80. My dissatisfaction comes from the anemometer. The system uses the thermometer sensor unit as its central data collection, and that sends the data for all the sensors to the base station and a wireless gateway. Everything has to be no more than 200 feet from the thermometer. I have my rain gauge next to my CoCoRaHS gauge, 110 feet away from the thermometer on my front porch. My porch faces north, and the thermometer never gets hit by the sun.
I tried to put the anemometer at the same spot in the yard (it's my best spot for rain & wind sensing), but although the rain gauge has no problem getting its signal through the walls of my house, the anemometer cannot. I might try moving my thermometer up in the eaves of my back porch, but I think the morning sun might disrupt those readings. Given the small size of my lot, the wind gauge isn't going to be super accurate anywhere, so I'm guessing I'll end up with that somewhere in the front of the lot.
Finally, there isn't any interface to feed your weather data to any of the crowd sourced weather data sites. It just lets you see your own data on a their website.
An interesting story about the BBC's Shipping Forecast, from NPR
http://www.npr.org/2013/12/16/249722733/the-shipping-forecast-from-britains-seas-into-its-soul
Fog Bank, Jan. 6, 2014
