Coffee Farm Weather Station

About 15 years ago I moved to my coffee farm in Hawaii. One of the first things I wanted to do was to was put up a weather station. Here on the Big Island we have very diverse weather and even have micro-climates where the weather can vary considerably just a few miles away. For example, we have a desert region close to a rain forest.

I never got a weather station and have regretted it since. That all changed recently. I went to Ebay and bought a used system and it appeared here this week. It arrived in decent shape with only one part damaged., the wind direction vane which had 1/2 of the post broken. I tried super glue but when I went to install the unit in the test location I found that piece had fallen off and I can’t find it.

I went to the Abient Weather website and found one for $9 but the cost to ship was $45. Seems they don’t normally use USPS. I sent Customer Service a message and they agreed to ship the small part by USPS and would refund the difference in shipping cost to me. I appreciate their customer service!

I reset the unit and configured it. Testing showed all seems to be fine.

I created a Wunderground account and the station will be available online for those who want to see weather data from my farm. It will take a few more days for me to get a permanent pole installed in a place away from tall trees which affect the wind speed and direction readings. The unit I chose communicates with the console base station via 915 mhz, then the console communicates via wifi to my internet connection. If I want to put the sending unit far from the house, then the console has to be near it and then a wifi router nearby. That means that I can’t just run a LAN cable to the unit wherever it is. If I put the console outside somewhere then I can solve the problem with some extra equipment. I may do that later. For now I’ll make do.

I assume this all may take a week or two to work out how best to mount this and where. Then the reading should show up at the following:

https://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=KHICAPTA14#history

I think that once the system comes online, the location on the map will be correct also.