New mobile weather station on the market

[Rocky Rascovich]

I just got my new Weatherwise magazine in today and saw this ad for a mobile weather station. This looks alot more compact and easier to use than the ones that I've seen on some other vehicles.

I would like some input about this from some of the more tech freaks on the list. This may be something I may entertain getting for next season.
The link is below.

http://www.newmountain.com/

Rocky&family

 

[Mikey Gribble]

That thing looks awesome, but I have a hard time sinking $1,300 into a weather station that would ride on the top of my car.

 

[Brian Emfinger]

Wow! I'm sold. I didnt want all that crap up there but I did want more than having the kestrel which I found I seldom used anyway because of the effort (with everything else going on) involved. It also seems it wouldnt be so prone to being broken.

That being said I am hesitant that this seems to have come out of no where and theres not a lot of info on it online or on their website so I will wait for now.

 

[John Diel]

This looks suspiciously like a repackaged Columbia system. Same price range, appears to be the same type technology.

http://www.columbiaweather.com/Orion_Weather_Station.html

 

[Tim Samaras]

Look out!

Hoo boy...

Before ANYONE plucks down the big $$$ for this...please visit this site.

...and you can read about the product here from the REAL manufacture who is AIRMAR.

Rocky, I think the product is OK (I have one)..but Newmountain.com simply repackaged this product and added $500. Also note that their website has a bunch of broken links.

The interesting thing about this..it has a compass, GPS, and a tilt sensor in it..and it **attempts** to calculate wind speed based on a moving vehicle using GPS (didn't do so well). I used the version 1 software last spring..and it was pretty rocky.

They have their newer version of sofware up..I may give that a try. I didn't use it this spring.

Tim

 

[Rocky Rascovich]

Hoo boy...



Rocky, I think the product is OK (I have one)..but Newmountain.com simply repackaged this product and added $500. Also note that their website has a bunch of broken links.

_________________


In addition to the broken links, whoever put the website together can't spell the best either. I appreciate the feedback and just based of what I've seen so far, if I do get this, it may be through the site that Tim suggested.

Thanks!

 

[Patrick McCarthy]

We used the AIRMAR wx station on one of our chase vans this summer for one week. It performed very well.

Impressions:
- the data sampling is in the 3-ish second range. I don't have the exact specs at hand, but it was very quick
- We are planning to do some robust comparsions with research grade equipment next spring
- in the field that week, we did go near some Environment Canada weather stations while on the highway, and the Temperture/DP measurements matched very closely
- the windspeed uses ultrasonic technology and seemed fairly accurate while the vehicle was stationary
- the windspeeds were less accurate at highway speeds. The University used rental vehicles. Prior to that, I had build a basic mount for my wife's Caravan. The mast was four feet high to get it out of the vehicle's apparent influence. After some adjustments, the wind speed direction while mobile was pretty good.
- Unfortunately, when the rentals arrived, the van was an Uplander which seems a lot less aerodynamic. We didn't have time to adjust the mast, and the wind sensor did not perform as well on the highway. But when the setup was working, it was neat to see the True and apparent wind speed and direction while on the highway.
- The system was never designed with a datalogger in mind. However, it does store up to 72 hrs of data that the software can access. However, there is no way to get at the info any other way because it uses a proprietary file format. We spoke with the company and they are now going to create an ASCII format in a future upgrade. They see that there many be an opportunity to expand their market. They also noted that a couple of TV chase vehicles were trying them out this summer, too.
- one minor issue was that it uses a marine threading standard. You have to purchase an adaptor to connect it to easier-to-find mounts/posts.
- overall, it's a really neat system. It has no moving parts and it is the size of a coffee cup. It worked beautifully over the 4000 km that week and we used it a lot. Because of its responsiveness, it was an asset in finding boundaries and showing our students the mesoscale aspects of field work while heading to our target areas. We were very happy with it. At this stage, its good for chasing/teaching, but the jury's still out for research usability.
- the system is wired and you need to purchase cable. The shortest length AIRMAR offers is about 25'.
- We'd like to use the built-in GPS for our navigation software but we couldn't figure out to do it.

 

[Andrea Griffa]

Thank you Rocky and Tim for sharing the links..
I was asking myself: do you need a radiation shield for a better perfom?

 

[John Diel]

Andrea,

Looking at the Airmar system and after reading Pat's post, This looks to be a completely self contained unit. More than likely, using as much solid state sensor technolgy rather than the older technology we know so well.

If you can get it properly mounted to a vehicle (Above the Bernoulli Effect range) I would say that this would work out fine for most cases. The 3 second sampling rate is a little slow to catch a lot of sudden short lived gusts, but for a more stable wind speed it should work out nicely.

The really nice thing I am starting to look at is the portability of the unit. Set up and Take down could be mere minutes as opposed to the longer times on most home built affairs.

The price is a little steep for a lot of Chasers but certainly affordable.

John Diel