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 Previous: The K7VVV Solar Update |  Next: N9GL's RF Safety Column: Do We Need to Protect Children from RF? |
By Stan Horzepa,
WA1LOU
Contributing Editor
July 20, 2002
This week, our topic is weather and we surf to a Web site for folks who watch the weather and the hams who provide the weather data that they watch.
View weather conditions from Amateur Radio weather stations around the world at the Citizens Weather Quality Assurance Web site (http://www.wxqa.com). |
Summer is upon us, and the weather that this season produces vies with winter for the amount of interest and consternation it causes. Heat, humidity, hurricanes and thunderstorms can upset those hazy, lazy, crazy days of summer. As a result, most folks keep their eye on the weather forecasts when they make their plans for enjoying the great outdoors.
Ham radio operators are no different. Some hams are so interested in the weather that they build weather stations to disseminate weather conditions over the air, typically, via packet radio and specifically, via the APRS flavor of packet radio. The dissemination of APRS weather data goes beyond the local coverage of the 2-meter APRS weather stations because APRS gateways to the Internet distribute the data via the worldwide Web.
Citizens Weather Quality Assurance Web site "is for Amateur Radio operators and private citizens who operate weather stations and send their data out via packet radio and/or the Internet." The purpose of the Web site "is to provide tools for these citizen operators to aid in checking and enhancing the quality of their weather data" to add "value to the weather data."
The Web site is also for anyone interested in viewing the weather conditions at the weather stations. To access this feature, click on the "Members Lists" hyperlink to display the APRSWXNET Member Lists page. Scroll down to the US map and click on a state to display a list of APRSWXNET members in that state.
From this page, there are a couple of methods to view the weather data. One way is to click the nearby "Stations" hyperlink for any member in the list and the Web site displays the current weather data for all the weather stations located near that member. Another way is to click on the "Members with Stations" hyperlink at the bottom of the page and the Web site displays a list of the members with weather stations. From that list, you can view the data from any weather station in graphical format by clicking on the "WxData" hyperlink for any member station.
Russ Chadwick, KB0TVJ, russ@wxqa.com, is the man behind the curtain running this show and he provides tools for those folks who are building or running a weather station. Having just put a weather station on the air myself, I found Russ's Web site to be invaluable in finding and verifying a problem I had with my station.
By the way, if you have a weather station on the air and wish to become a member of the APRSWXNET, click on the "Sign-up Information" hyperlink to find out how to join.
Until next time, keep on surfin'
Editor's note: Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, resides in downtown Wolcott, Connecticut, and is a member of the QQCC (QST quarter century club), i.e., he has been a QST writer for 25 years. Since getting his ticket in 1969, Stan has sampled nearly every entrée in the Amateur Radio menu (including a stint as Connecticut Section Manager), but he keeps coming back to his favorite preoccupations: VHF and packet radio. As a result, he runs a 2-meter APRS digipeater from his mountaintop location in central Connecticut. Stan has been a long time advocate of using computers with Amateur Radio and wrote programs to dupe contests and calculate antenna bearings way back in 1978. Today, he uses his Mac to surf the Internet searching for that perfect ham radio Web page. To contact Stan, send e-mail to wa1lou@arrl.net.
| Previous: The K7VVV Solar Update | Next: N9GL's RF Safety Column: Do We Need to Protect Children from RF? |
