Fishersville Weather Stations and Website News

06/21/2010 14:30

For those of you who were not aware, my old weather station was damaged beyond repair over a month ago from a 'close by' lightning strike.  After several attempts to get it running again I gave up and ordered a new Oregon Scientific WMR100N station from my friends at Ambient Weather.  Although I've had it mostly up since last Tuesday, the 15th, it was still running with my old control software.  As of 10am this morning, it's officially running with the latest control software and on a new web server.  If all went well, the website looks the same.  But you may have some old bookmarks that no longer work.  Please use only the web address below to access my Fishersville Weather Station.

  Fishersville Weather Station:  http://weather.fishersville.net/

There are a few links on the website that still need to be changed or repaired.  I'll get to them over the next several days.  I am also looking looking at moving away from Underground Weather for 'history' and 'rapid fire' to Weather Bug.  Stay tuned for more as that project gets underway.

Jack Cameron

6/10/10 22:15 I've ordered another workstation. We're talking low end Oregon Scientific WMR100N which will work with my existing control software and database. I expect it to be delivered as early as Monday 6/14.
6/01/10 15:00 The good news is that USB to serial adapter came. The bad news is that the station still does not communicate. So it's clear that the problem is with the weather station and not the control PC. The station is then officially dead. I'll see if I can justify the expense of getting a new station. I'm told perhaps I could find a refurbished one for under $200. If I do not get another station I'll probably stop maintaining this and any related website as well... thus no more rain or snow data either. Got to think about it... check back later.
5/28/10 15:18 Parts for the station control PC have yet to show up. My faith in eBay is lacking a bit. Maybe tomorrow.. maybe next week. On the other hand it's 50/50 at best if this will fix the station communication. If not, perhaps some of you can contibute a new station which I'll set up and manage like I've been doing. When I finally quit managing it the donors can be put in a drawing based on their donated % to get the station.
5/22/10 15:18 Still awaiting parts for the station control PC.
5/17/10 21:00 Moved the "Rain Guage" table to above the news table to keep track of my rain guage readings.
5/17/10 10:07 Another attempt to bring up the weather station has failed. Will not try again until the USB to COM port converter arrives.
5/16/10 09:04 Wow.. several of you were using the radar and other weather links on the Fishersville Weather page. So, for those of you who need the station page, you can get to it by clicking HERE. Please realize that the station is down so the actual weather data is not correct.



11/23/2009 11:24

After several days of tinkering with the old PC that serves as my weather station controller I managed to get it mostly working again.  The likely problem was PC disk drive controller which took out the primary hard drive's boot sector.   In the end, I was able to fix backup drive, install WinXP, and restore some of the lost data.. all without any cost.. so far.

The website is now up again, but without the historical data as that requires programs I'm not wanting to install and maintain.  On the up-side, I upgraded the control program to support a direct connection to my server via Underground Weather.  That link is on the left of the website and called "Rapid Fire".  Rapid fire requires that you have Adobe's Flash player installed; most Windows systems and browsers already have it.  If it works for you, and my weather station stays up, you'll have a view of my current data refreshed about every 10 seconds or so.  Feel free to bookmark a link to "Rapid Fire".

   Fishersville weather: http://weather.fishersville.net/

Change summary:

  1. Historical data and links "Reports and Charts" removed.
  2. Rapid Fire link added to main page.
  3. Monthly and Yearly Summary reports  moved to main page.  These are right off my station so snow data cannot be combined with rain to show moisture.
  4. SHD and CHO metar link on main page.
  5. Local Weather Exchange links (page bottom) expanded to include many more stations.

Pitfalls:

  1. Rain tipping bucket not heated which will mess up data in freezing weather.
  2. Anemometer has a bad mercury sensor which sometimes results in very high, incorrect, readings.
  3. Some old bookmarks and now invalid. All bookmarks except "http://weather.fishersville.net/" will soon be invalid.  The server will move from nTelos to a private server.

11/16/2009 19:35

For those of you who were using links on my weather site I've put some of those right below. Isuppose I can create another front page with these and other weather related links. But for now, this is it...

11/15/2009 08:40

Well, repeated attempts to get the weather station controller going have failed due to a hardware problem with the hard drive controller. This computer is a very old IBM Aptiva that's been in constant 24/7 service since 1998. And even older is my WM-918 Oregon Scientific weather station. So, unless some funding shows up to replace all this, it's time to say good-by to the Fishersville Weather website.

I'll leave this page here for a while so y'all know what's happened. If you had bookmarked some of the other site pages those will also stay around for a while, but obviously will not update anymore.

Jack Cameron

11/14/2009 14:20

The Fishersville weather station controller experienced a major hard drive failure on 11/14/2009 at 6:30am. Unfortunately, attempts to recover the disk have also failed resulting in data loss back to the last backup on 11/11/2009. Due to the very old weather station hardware this might be the right time to retire it from further service.

When a decision has been reached as to what to do it will be posted here.

Thanks,

Jack Cameron