Upminster Weather
www.upminsterweather.co.uk
External data
About me and my station
My name is Alan and I have lived in Upminster for almost 20
years. Since 1963 I have been working for BT as a radio / electronic
Engineer, however four years ago I took early retirement so I now have more
time to indulge in my many hobbies and interests.
I have four Children, one Step-Daughter and four Grand Children.
The program that we are using is called Weather-Display and was written by
Brian Hamilton. Brian is a sheep farmer who lives in New Zealand and in his
spare time enjoys writing this really good software. Bolted on to WD
is "Weather Display Live", this excellent software has been written by
Julian Best of Colchester Weather. The WD software is
also linked to my Amateur Radio equipment from which a block of weather data is
sent out at intervals of 30 minutes on VHF radio. The frequency used is
144.80 Mhz. The system is known as APRS and is in the form of a map based
visual packet data display.
The equipment that I am currently using consists of a Davis Vantage pro plus
weather station. As you can see from the photographs on the photo gallery
page care has been taken to ensure that the sensors are suitably sited so as
to comply with met office specifications.
The dish that you can see in the "station pictures" screen is used to receive live
digital pictures from the new MSG1 Geostationary Satellite. With James help I am
hoping to get some of these images onto the site. Because of copyright these
images will have to be delayed by a few hours.
The computer that is running this site has a dual core Intel E6600 2.4Ghz processor with a 4mb Cache. The system has two Seagate OEM 320Gig SATA 11 hard drives which are configured in RAID 1 ie mirror imaging. In case of a mains failure the system has a 1.4Kva UPS backup.
My Amateur radio call sign is G3RJI and James is 2E0AVQ, we both operate on
all frequencies from HF through to UHF.