Philadelphia Area Weather has finally got a fully featured weather station to monitor conditions at our headquarters, here in Perkasie, Pennsylvania. Although the price is something to save up for, it was well worth every dollar spent. Here are some pictures of the station...from box to outdoors (click on a picture for a larger image).

After much delibaration between which station to get, we settled on a wireless VantagePro station, a brand new fully featured station from Davis Instruments (http://www.davisnet.com). The complete wireless VantagePro station (not plus) cost $595.00 plus sales tax. The package arrived via UPS on August 9, 2001 after extensive tracking online. The station was set up that night, of August 9th, and took less than an hour to set up the ISS (Integrated Sensor Suite). The console is sharp and easy to read, and required little pre-programming.

The console, even back lit if you choose, can be read anywhere within 500' of the station, given there are no metal hazards in between. It gives you information on indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity, as well as barometric pressure and wind speed/direction measurements. The console calculates heat index, dewpoint and wind chill. Rain data is convient, and the station even calculates rain rates, and has many different rain totals for different periods of time. The station can store up to 24 years of daily data! The station also has a powerful graphing freature with graphs for every value, and you can easily adjust parameters and intervals of those graphs. The station updates data as much as every 2.5 seconds and has many alarms to alert you of weather information at your set paramaters. The station also takes all the data into consideration to produce an ACCURATE forecast, updated every hour.

The weather station was installed just about 24 hours before a severe thunderstorm blew through the area the next day. That was one of the main reasons that we almost installed the station in the darkness of night. The station recorded a 28 mph wind gust and a rain rate of over 4 inches!

PHLweather will soon be in the process of adding different sensors and utilities onto the station including UV sensors and soil moisture sensors...eventually. We also plan to add a heater for the rain guage by this winter to measure the water content of snow and ice. We also may add a program on our computer called "Weather Link" that can store data from the station and update it through our website. Stay tuned...more additions shortly.

You can view archived high/low data (not live)...CLICK HERE.


Bill Deger
8/13/01

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