In August, 2001 we installed an Oregon Scientific WMR-968 Wireless Weather Station on the roof of our home. We live on a high hill in an excellent location for monitoring weather. With my involvement in Skywarn and emegency operations for St. Louis County, the weather station is a valuable tool. It's also interesting and fun for the neighborhood kids as well as educational.

As far as the technical specifications of the station go - the WMR-968 has wireless modules which transmit temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall, windspeed and direction. The receiving unit then calculates dewpoint, wind chill and rate of rainfall, among other things.  The modules are solar-powered with standard or lithium battery backup. I use the lithium batteries as they have an anticipated life of 20 months. All transmission are sent  at 433 Mhz to the receiving unit which runs either on batteries or ac power. This allows you to carry the panel with you, should you need to calibrate or check a module. The panel connects, via serial cable, to a PC and interfaces with many commercial programs to bring up screens such as the one you see below.

You can visit Oregon Scientific's website for a full description, along with detailed specifications of the WMR-968 Weather Station. It's quite an impressive station for not much money - considering the capabilities. The WMR-968 can be purchased on the web through other retailers for considerably less than the suggested retail price.

Software for the Weather Station...personally I prefer a software program called Virtual Weather Station by Ambient to interface with my station. I have tried several different programs and this one has been the best so far for me.

Enough of the technical stuff.  The screen on the previous page is what's reported on the weather station... the only difference is that instead of being live, this screen is updated every 5 minutes. One of these days soon we hopefully will be able to update every 5 seconds or so...that's being worked on and is planned for the near future.

If you are interested in putting together a station and don't know where to start or have one and just want to talk about it, feel free to email me. My email button is on the front page and I try to answer mail promptly.