Cabledog.net

I have had a weather station at my home in Olathe, KS since about 1998.  Since I do not live at the airport where the official weather stats come from it’s useful to have a record of what the weather has been like at *my house* where I live.   It also was handy when I was a storm spotter and storm fronts came in.  I have at various times made the data available on the internet.  I live near downtown Olathe and have in the past received emails from strangers thanking me because they used the real-time data or charts to help them plan some outing or activity in the area.  I also find tracking the weather and particularly the barometric pressure for purposes of determining conditions for a form of radio wave propagation called tropospheric ducting.

Originally my weather station was a Radio Shack WX-200 along with various other sensors glued together by a Linux server, but recently I have scrapped that for sensors that all utilize the 1-wire bus.  So far I have a weather station by AAG (photo to the left) that has the temperature, wind speed, and wind direction in one unit.  The lightning detector uses an antenna that I bought for a few bucks in the late nineties from a company called Stormwise that’s connected to a 1-wire counter.  I plan to install the rest of the sensors soon, weather permitting. 

All sensors are wired to a unit called HA7Net (1-Wire to ethernet hub) which then allows the thermd program on my Linux server to poll the data, log it, and also upload it to the Wunderground.com website and also at the PWS Weather site.