The Ambient Weather WS-1080 weather station has been operational and gathering data for several days now. So far I’ve been very pleased with the unit.
Living several miles north of Fort Wayne, we often have slightly different temperatures and weather conditions than those reported by the television stations and weather websites like weather.com or wunderground.com.
It’s nice to monitor the live telemetry and review the 24-hour highs/lows and graphs right from my Lazyboy.
Based on my limited use thus far, I’ve already taken a preference to viewing the data on the computer rather than navigating through the receiver’s touch screen display.
Software-
The software package that came with the unit is EasyWeather 6.1. This software does a nice job for basic monitoring.
In doing my product pre-purchase research I learned about Sandaysoft’s Cumulus, which has become my primary montoring application.
Cumulus is a free (donationware) application that enables computer based telemetry monitoring of a full range of data (click on the image for a larger view of the dashboard). It also provides a nice assortment of graphs including wind speed, outside temp, inside temp, pressure, rainfall rate (in/hr), wind direction, temp min-max-avg, humidity, rain today, and daily rain totals.
Cumulus also provides an option to update a website with realtime data (via FTP). It even includes a template for the site, so you can get it up quickly.
Now that I’ve got the unit up and running it’s time to get it mounted in it’s permanant location- on the old Dish Network bracket mounted on the roof.
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Links-
Amazon has a newer version, the Ambient Weather WS1090 Weather Station which as an atomic clock and data logging- It’s a great unit for the price! Check it out HERE…
Sandaysoft- Cumulus Software (good stuff!)
This is a nice weather system you have there. If you don’t mind me asking how much did it set you back? Keep up the good work.
Rook
It was only $99 from Ambient Weather.
I also added a solar/heat shield (not shown in the picture- that will be shown in a future post). That was kind of expensive for what it is, but I think it’s worth having.
There’s nothing like having ‘real’ local weather data to review- especially the overnight low temps and ‘true’ rainfall.
Have you tested the thermo for accuracy with the included shield vs. the optional one you added to it? Does the thermometer seem to be fairly accurate in direct sunlight?
I have this same weather station, and had hoped that the thermometer would be a bit more accurate, but with the shield that was included it still seems to be sensitive to the sun heating it up. I was thinking that extra shield might be a nice solution. Does it fit well right off the bat?
Hi Jim,
Since that post I have installed the larger shield and it did make a BIG difference. I was getting blatantly inaccurate readings in direct sunlight. After installing the larger shield, I placed the small shield on one of the other (LaCrosse) sensors I had and it’s better but is also apparently inaccurate in direct sunlight.
I feel that the temp readings are now pretty accurate. We live 20miles north of the official weather station for the area, so our weather readings are almost always different from NOAA or the TV weather.
It does fit okay in the larger shield. It is designed to hold the larger units but it will fit together without any modifications. The one drawback is that in order to change the batteries the bottom thumbscrews will need to be removed and unit partially disassembled to get access to the unit. I think the larger units might be sensor only, with the batteries in a different component.
I’m planning an update post soon. That will include the roof mount, solar shield, web-published data using cumulus, etc.
Please let me know if there are any questions.
Steve.
Excellent info, thanks. I just adjusted mine a bit this afternoon to try to get it away from earthbound sources of heat, and that made a little difference, but I still think that the heat from the sun is the biggest issue. I think I’ll give that bigger shield a try and see how that works!