Stand-alone solar weather station?

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Our local lake doesn’t have any good or even reasonable weather reporting. And the weather.gov forecasts are from over 20 miles away, and often way off. It’s a 1.4 hour drive to get there, so we would really appreciate better weather information.

We’d like to install two self-contained solar powered weather stations that are internet connected.
One similar model is the tempest weather station by WeatherFlow; it is solar powered, and connects to any nearby WiFi channel.
(It has one limitation in that it’s network connection hum is DC powered.)

They apparently have a prototype and planned product which is completely solar powered, and has phone linkage built-in, but that is not yet available.

We are interested in any similar solutions that someone may have setup at their local kite spots.

One sees lots of governmental units like this on bridges, overpasses, etc. with a solar panel and some sort of uplink. Not sure what they cost, but we would need something cheap, and with low subscription costs for the uplink.

WeatherFlow relates that they are working on a Pro version of the Tempest that will have his capability, but release date unknown, and I think this is pending for over a year now.

There is not any nearby WiFi connections - closest is 1-2 miles away, depending on placement. The site has good phone reception. There are trees around, but we would place about 200 meters from any cover.

I have seen some commercial and military versions of such things, but am not familiar with their cost or usage - so am hoping others have found good options.

2

Welcome Guthrie,
Are there houses or buildings with wifi nearby at the lake?
Do you need a full weather station or just the wind speed and direction?
How good is the mobile phone reception?
Is there a location where you can install a tall pole clear of obstacles?
There have been some similar discussions such as:

and more topics if you use the search magnifying glass at the top of this page.
I am in Australia and use two other weather station designs directly to the mobile phone network and one of them has issues with the different mobile phone towers due to the weather station cards becoming outdated. The other one is designed in Australia for Australian mobile systems so neither of the remote mobile phone stations I use would be ideal.
This is the other topic I remember discussed some ideas:

cheers Ian :slight_smile:

3

You’re going to need to provide more data for us to suggest options.

  • Budget - how do you define ‘cheap’ and ‘low’ above ?
  • Connectivity - how do any neighbors access Internet ?
  • Internet - do you want to feed Weather Underground (or equivalent), or something else ?
4

Well, cheap is of course necessarily vague - because depending on cost, we would look for financing.
This is out in a park by a lake, no nearby Internet - closest would be ~ 1-2 miles, depending on placement options.
Connecting to other sites is good, but the main criteria.
At least being able to see the real weather (mostly wind) is the primary goal.

5

Ian,
thanks for the note and info.
the first one you reference is pretty neat, but much bigger and DIY than we want/need.
I’d like something like this: pgsonda.cz – IoT WEATHER STATION
Or perhaps: 1chip Station for Windguru.cz (although I was not clear on the details of connectivity for this one)
Or this: Wireless Weather Station | The MWS-C400 | Intellisense Systems Inc.
although I suspect it it expensive to both purchase and operate.

Also: Holfuy automatic weather stations and sensors, mobile, GSM, NB-IoT, WIFI, 3G, GPRS, SOLAR
Although they are not shipping now, and again are for a higher-end market, so probably $$$.

6

Lets try it another way…

  • what country are you in ?
  • how many US Dollars is too much to pay ?
  • how many US Dollars/month is too much for sustaining costs ?
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US.
Perhaps $1K US to purchase, $1200/year to operate?

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I have seen/found several options which require a SIM card for data access/upload.
Most SIM card deals I see include purchase of a phone, which I don’t need.
And this would be very low actual data traffic.
Any experience with a good product for this?

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