Amateur Weather Data Station Logs, Chiang Mai Thailand

I have been interested in collecting weather data logs for many years. Logs have been gathered from Bahrain, Oman, and Thailand, spanning some 12 years. My current location in Chiang Mai is called Sansai (18.52. North and 99.01 South, grid reference NK98mm ) some 15 Klm north of Chiang Mai City Airport.

The equipment is a Davis weather data center with a recent addition two years ago, of a rain collector. No claim is made for true barometric readings, as I have never carried out any calibration tests against a know reference, so the barometric readings are relative only.

The weather link (modem) and data logger are located in the tool shed under the 10 meter water tower, where the wind speed, wind direction vane, and humidity unit are installed on top. Some 20 meters four core cable runs from the tool shed to the radio room computer.

Currently logs are displayed on the web via a graphical screen capture program, and uploaded to the server as often as possible. Graphic resolution is kept to a minimum to conserve server space.

Weather station atop of water tower

The story of Windy2 attacked by ants

In December 2007 I purchased direct from Davis Instruments USA a new Vantage Pro2 cabled version weather station to replace my ageing "Weather Wizard 3." The new unit was installed not on the water tank as shown in the above picture, but on my amateur radio tower, shown below, some 40 meters tall. The ISS unit comprising of a wind speed, wind direction, rain measuring bucket, temperature and humidity unit was installed just above the bungalow roof level at a height of approximately 4 meters. The new Vantage Pro2 unit was nick named Windy2

Windy2 New Home

This operated without fault until mid June 2011 when erratic communication failures began between the ISS unit and the consol unit. Correct communication is indicated by a small pulsating "X" found on the lower right had corner of the consul display unit. If communications are broken a letter "L" is displayed

Vantage PRO2 Console Showing a letter "L" bottom right hand corner.

There are several diagnostic menus' that are helpful; the easiest is to look at the stations "Browse Station Data" icon on the PC program at the top of the screen. This diagnostic page gives a full history report, the communication report is found in the last two columns at the extreme right hand side of the screen page. The ISS reception report should show 100% data, along with the set reporting time intervals.

WeatherLink Icons. Report Page 6th from right

ISS Reception Data Report

In my case this data was very erratic, so the ISS unit was removed from the tower. The top cover of the ISS unit was removed and found to be full of very large red and black ants. Hundreds of them had made several nests comprising of some sort of sticky goo substance.

ISS unit notice ants on ground after spilling out

The ISS unit and PCB were cleaned, but communications still did not report correctly and very intermittent. Several attempt at cleaning the PCB resulted in marginally improved communication, which would stop when the humidity was high.

ISS unit large cluster of ants top right hand side

ISS Unit Ants moving eggs bottom left and bottom right

ISS unit ants running away from ISS lid

ISS PCB notice the clump of ants oozy mess top left. Cause of PCB failure

As a temporary fix, the ISS unit was installed inside the house. I would not recommend this approach as it entails all sort of interchange cables and connectors, as the rain bucket wind and direction units have still to be mounted outside.

Several technical reported where sent to Davies Instruments USA about this problem, who eventually sent a replacement ISS PCB to my local Thailand Davis Instrument agent. The agent contacted me and kept me informed of events and promptly sent the PCB to me that they had received direct from USA .

The agent's service was excellent, with prompt e-mail replies, and very friendly telephone calls. The new ISS PCB was promptly reinstalled on the radio tower, and has since operated without falter.