I am having windspike readings that are not accurate. Sometimes they appear a few times a night in the dead of calm, other times they appear during a rather windy day. Almost always it is a 19 to 25 mph reading. I replaced the anemometer and direction indicator setup with a brand new one from O.S. and it changed nothing at all!! So if anyone needs a spare for a WM918, message me and i’ll send it to you free of charge if you pay shipping!! Back to the problem… what else can i look for to find the source of the spikes? I really don’t see the spike on the 918s display at all. Is there a know problem i’m missing? The windspike chop option isn’t helping. Feel free to suggest anything at this point…
We see that problem on the WS-2310 because the cabling isn’t shielded. What kind of cabling does the WM918 use?
From the anemometer/direction assy its 4 conductor flat phone cable with a RJ45. The temp sensor had a short wire on it so i replaced it with 40ft of CAT5 cable because i needed it to be in the shade, no problems with it. The rain gauge has round shielded 2 conductor cable on it with a RJ11. All these feed into some sort of “hub” with 8 conductor flat cable to the station, around 8ft of it… hope that helps…
KG4TXC
Do you happen to be transmitting when the spikes occur?
Have a bit of this with an AAG one wire annemometer.
Here it’s fed with CAT5 shielded cable. However, when transmitting at the 1.5 Kw level I can still cause some spikes – even though the transmitting antenna is over 75’ away. Lower power and closer antennas could do it too.
I’ve slipped ferrites over the shielded cable at the computer end and gotten rid of most of it.
Transmission on 17 meters is still a bit of a problem Going to make up a trap and see if the remaining problems disappear.
Brian/K3KO
Henderson, NC
Nope, not transmitting but good guess my fellow ham! The wind equipment is up 35ft right under my 70cm dipole though… I know its not causing the spike and I’m pretty sure the spike is caused after the “hub” and maybe even after the station but I’m not sure… Brian is there a way for WD to inspect the packets from the station? I know the little red light would be lit on bad data but does it stay red even after just one packet? anyway to log bad packets? I’d like to see if a bad packet= wind spike on the WD display.
it will be electrical inteference/feedack from the serial port
this is well known and has been well documented for years with the wm918
a RF balun on the cables or replacing them with better quality cables, like CAT5 (twisted pairs)fixes this issue
(yes, its the same issue witht he la crosse 2310…the problem is that these cheaper weather stations use cheap and nasty data cables)
so, best remedy is everything from the anemometer assembly back to the station should be CAT5? Or just install baluns at each end of every cable? or both!!