My VP2 has been getting false 79 MPH wind gust spikes about once or twice a month, #-o#-o
The Wind anemometer has been relocated 27 feet above the ground on a 6 foot pole tripod on a roof peak.
I used standard phone cord but now I think I have to rewire it with twisted pair cat 5 wire instead.
I really hate ladders. :x
I tried setting the “Gust spike ignore value” to 79 but that had no effect.
(Is this setting supposed to help?)
Control panel, Offsets, Limits.
Geez I wasn’t aware this is/was a problem, the same thing happened to me the other day during some gusty conditions. There was no way the gust was 79mph but since this has never happened before I figured it was a fluke, now you’ve got me wondering. I have no problem with ladders Mike and would gladly help out, but the drive to your house could be a killer!
I recorded one of 29MPH on a perfectly calm day…also thought it might be just an anomaly but now…?? Anemometer is 33’ off the ground and clear of any impediments.
This may only apply if you have a cabled VP (or if you’re running on AC power for the console) … I’d recorded 114mph winds when it rained. Turned out to be a ground-loop in the serial interface to the PC that I’d removed by using an optical isolator for the serial port connection. Haven’t had the problem since.
I’d used the B&B electronics 9POP4 powered DB9 serial optical isolator. Pricey, but it works
This happened to me twice in February (false 79 mph gusts) after I changed the gust limits in WD from the defaults. I changed things back to the defaults and no 79 mph gusts since. I figured it was just something with my settings but now it looks like there is a bug in WD since others have seen the same thing.
More often than not spikes are weather station hardware problems or electrical interference. Notice that all posters in this thread with the spike have Davis equipment.
If I remember correctly (and this may not be right) that setting is for stations other than VPs. I used it with my LaCrosse with some success but the ferrite choke actually took care of the LaCrosse problem. Someone who has been around longer than I have can either back me up or correct me.
This may be true for some but my 79 mph gusts were not real because the console maximum for the day in both cases was not 79 mph. This told me something in WD was changing the incoming data. The other odd thing here is why 79 mph for both of us?
I have the same spikes. What is strange is I have been using this Davis since last year and have never had a problem. Yesterday I recorded 79mph and again today. I have updated WD and am wondering if it is in the software somewhere.
I think you need to try and identify where the faulty reading is coming from. As mentioned earlier, if it doesn’t show up on the max reading on the console then it’s unlikely to be caused by the VP/VP2 itself.
I could imagine a little trace utility within WD which remembers say the past few loop packets. And, when necessary, you could activate the trace and ask it to look for eg wind speeds of 79mph or whatever error condition is being encountered. If it finds one then it dumps the loop packet responsible to a file - ideally in native binary format since that would be the only reliable way of capturing the exact byte sequence that might have triggered the problem. Then perhaps a separate little utility could read the dump file and illuminate the problem.
I’m not sure it’s worth the coding effort, but it’s the sort of tool that would help a lot in pinning down - at least to the component in the data processing stream that’s responsible - what might be causing this sort of frustrating problem.
if it does not show on the console, then it could be WD’s routine that gets the max gust reading for the day from the console…that routine might sometimes be getting a wrong reading…what I will need to do is get it to ignore a 70mph reading…which is what this failure always comes out at ,it seems
