After joining the NorCars (www.norcars.net) net several years ago I quickly decided that I wanted to pass weather information that was specific to what was  outside my shacks window. After researching the various personal weather stations available for use in the home environment I decided to ‘wet’ my feet with a WS-2080. I purchased the WS-2080 from the following web site, www.ambientweather.com that is backed up by an understanding and supportive staff. I settled on their WS-2080 for several reasons, one its simplicity would allow me to understand how to properly setup a personal weather station and secondly its cost of $100.00 would not hurt my radio allowance.

The temperature / humidity sensor sets above ground at the recommended height of six feet, the wind speed / direction indicator is at a height of 34 four feet. The rain gauge sets above the ground at  six feet with a clearance of more than fifty feet from any  surrounding objects. The monitor is located in the house located  approximately forty feet from the sending unit, the temperature /  humidity sensor. The monitor is cabled via the supplied USB cable to a PC running Windows XP professional with SP2 installed.

The WS-2080 ships with its own software that allows you to submit your weather information to weather underground as well as providing weather history for your location. After a week or so of using this I discovered the software that shipped with the WS-2080 was not granular enough for my needs and wants so I replaced it with ˜Weather Display”. Using Weather Display software allowed me first and foremost to calibrate my WS-2080 against my local airports METAR in addition to allowing me to  setup my own weather web site. Weather Display costs an additional $70.00 but it was well worth the expense, at least to me. Support for this fine program is in the public domain and Brian, the owner and programmer, who lives in Australia never fails to answer even my most  trivial question. The software can be downloaded as a thirty day demo from: www.weather-display.com

The last piece of software that displays the collected weather information for my weather website, weather.k1ajd.net, is Weather Display Carter Lake AJAX/PHP Weather Templates. This software is one hundred percent public domain and is available at www.saratoga-weather.org

This installation / configuration has worked flawlessly here at the K1AJD shack for almost a year.

If there are any questions about my setup here please do not hesitate to ask via a email directly to: tony at k1ajd.net .