Peter Goodhall, 2E0SQL - M3PHP » weather

EUMETcast Setup Ordered

Peter — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:56:28 +0000

So after visiting the Newbury Rally and Boot Sale and seeing the The Group for Earth Observation demo of the EUMETcast weather satellite system, I decided along with Dad that we should really get the system to do it so thats exactly what I’ve done in the evening I ordered

Group for Earth Observation Membership
DVB World USB Receiver
Dish + LNB
Satellite meter
EUMETCast Client Software
EUMETCast Key Unit

The EUMETCast stuff is currently being approved by their legal department once that’s sorted, they’ll phone and take payment and sent it out from Germany. The rest of the equipment will be arriving in the post hopefully this week.

Culumus Web Page Theme

Peter — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:28:36 +0000

I’ve been running the Sandaysoft Culumus software since October last year and have nothing but praise for the software, it allows you to do everything from downloading data from weather station base units, to Tweeting the information. One thing I’ve always thought was the themes for web pages weren’t up to much so the I spent some time this month developing my own but in a way it could be useful to others.

The idea was to use a local city/town scape background then display all the different areas of data within boxes, its also easily customisable if you want to add more menu tabs and extra content you can see a live copy of the theme at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/

The theme and all its files including PSD files are hosted on Github http://github.com/magicbug/Culumus-Weather-Theme/ your free to download, use, tinker.

Reinstated QFH Weather Antenna

Peter — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:31:59 +0000

After reconnecting up the weather satellite receiver (RX2) and connecting it up to the Diamond V2000 vertical to decode the NOAA APT satellite passes it was finally time to put a dedicated antenna back up, in the form of a quadrifilar helicoidal antenna (QFH) this antenna hasn’t been used in about 4 years so I was surprised it worked perfectly. the results from using the V2000 weren’t that bad it would decode passes just below Iceland down to the top of Spain.

With the QFH its decoding from well above the top of Iceland all the way down to Algeria, and best of all the images are mostly noise free. the antenna is only about 10 feet off the ground attached to the rose arch in the garden.

You can have a look at the images at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/apt/daily/ their uploaded a couple of minutes after each pass automatically by the software.

TweetWX one day web mashup

Peter — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:39:20 +0000

I’ve been tweeting weather information from the weather station at the home QTH for a couple of months and now there’s even more stations doing so, following the stations can distract you from actual non automated tweets so I decided Wednesday to code up a little site called TweetWX.

What TweetWX does is searches twitter for the weather terms “Wind, Barometer, Temperature, Rain, Humidity” then shows the tweets in a timeline this refreshes every 40 seconds with any new weather tweets available.

Each time it reads a tweet it also checks to see if we’ve stored it in our database if not it collects its profile data and stores it so its available as a list on the site for users to find all the current stations available!

The whole site took 1 day to code using the PHP framework CodeIgniter, You can check it out by visiting http://www.magicbug.co.uk/tweetwx

APT Weather Satellites

Peter — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:25:52 +0000

After about 3 years of not decoding APT weather satellite pictures, I decided 1 weeks ago to setup the Rig RIGSAT RX2 again and connected it up to the Diamond V2000, for the software I decided instead of using the Time-step software to use a free application called APT Decoder which can track, decode and process the satellite pass without any involvement from a human.

Afterwards it has the ability to upload the decoded image and provides an RSS feed which can be subscribed to, which is handy as you can view the image on any type of device as long as you have Internet access.

After a week and a half of decoding the results have been relativity good considering its not using a crossed or QFH style antenna, images do have noticeable noise on them but there still usable. and the software has performed without any issues.

You can find the latest images at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/apt/daily/

Weather Station now sends Tweets!

Peter — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 18:27:22 +0000

The other night I was chatting to Paul (M0TZO) who suggested I made the weather station which I have at home send tweets automatically I thought this was a great idea and noticed that Cumulus by Sandaysoft now supports twitter. So it was just a simple task of adding a few details to get it all to work, what’s more surprising is the fact it seems popular!

You can follow by going to http://twitter.com/oxfordwx which updates on an hourly basis. Tim (G4VXE) has also added his weather station at Longworth you can find it at http://twitter.com/LongworthWx

Lovely Feb Weather!

Peter — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 15:59:13 +0000

Surpisingly the weather has been really nice today, even better that it was on my day off from university!