Hello all. I’m a new tempest owner. It just arrived and was installed yesterday. I’m a long time weather station owner from the early 2000s. I’ve been a ham radio operator along with my wife for over 35 years. I was very excited to get the station installed as I’ve never had any type of lightning alert system located here. As I was installing, the thunder started. Before the next couple of hours passed, I had over 2,000 strikes recorded. I’m really impressed by the station and love the data.
Many are concerned about birds. We do live on a farm in Kentucky and being rural there are a lot of birds. But, I don’t recall ever having a bird on any weather station that I have had. I put a wooden snake that has many sections on the pole with the station. Any breeze makes the wooden snake move and birds do stay away. (I even startled myself once while the snake was in a draw before installing.) I ordered the snake from Amazon.
I have pictures below. I look forward to reading weather station comments, tips and tricks.
This will probably get merged with the Station Pictures tread, so FYI in case you look for it later.
There is a bird deterrent accessory that WeatherFlow offers that slips over the top with little spikes and most report it does not interfere with the light/UV sensor.
Thanks very much for the welcome! I appreciate your comments about the location. It’s only about 6 1/2 feet high but reading the website I see 6 to 8 feet is good. Nice to see a fellow ham operator. My call is KC4BFF. My wife has been licensed longer than I have! She is KC4BFE. I suppose she was licensed about a half a second before me as they printed the licenses in 1987.
Looks great, except there is a high chance you’ll get false rain readings from vibrations in the fence traveling up the pole to the Tempest sensor. You may need to mount it on its own pole in that case.
I placed mine on the corner of my deck and no pole, but it’s been amazingly accurate with rain, wind, temps, etc…placed a screw mount on top of the wood railing, and BOOM! Perfect.
Well, the vibration was way too much and recorded “false rain” as a result.
I added some guywires to stiffen the mast.
That worked great, and eliminated the false rain, until I needed to service the unit because the solar panel failed.
I was VERY uncomfortable working on the peak of the roof.
For my second unit I used higher quality antenna masts, very heavy gauge.
This picture makes it look like those power lines are close, they are not; they are in the front of the house about 75’ away.
Hi, everyone. I received my Tempest a couple of days ago and finally had the time to mount it. The best available place I could find was on a 4x4 fence post after entering the back yard. I attached it to a 10’ conduit pipe. It seemed pretty sturdy after strapping down. Hopefully no false rain readings due to wind.
Very Nice! I’m jealous of the large open space! Where is your station located? Could you provide a link to its location (e,g, tempestwx . com / station / ##### ) where ##### is your statinonID? It’s always nice to share a station’s data with others on the WF/Tempest° Community Forum.
Just got my tempest installed (with still hung loosely battery pack cable). 'Mostly… I had to include the picture of the trees to the south of us. 'Once we hit, ohh… mid October? The sun will go behind those trees and not emerge till spring. This spot will get a bit more sun for longer then most other spots and… bonus, my wife does not have to ‘look at it’. (Which honestly is problem the most important optimization)
