Weather Station Setup

Having spent quite a bit of time messing around with a Raspberry Pi, where it took hours just to get a few temperature probes running, it was refreshing to have a nice, made for consumer object like setting up the weather station: an AmbientWeather Osprey 2902. I chose this station because the company provides more data accessibility, with options like CSV downloads and an API from their servers, in addition to being well-reviewed. The ultimate goal being to compile this, along with other data, into a compressive sensor network and data log for the farm.
I also now have an active weather station on Weather Underground, I feel so powerful!
Setup goes something like this: screw on the wind vane/anemometer, mount onto appropriate pole with appropriate northerly orientation, place in batteries, and plug in the console. Presto!
The hard part is connecting to wifi. Apparently, the device only works well with 2.4 GHz wifi networks. 5GHz wifi has been around for many years now, so I’m not quite sure what the catch up is there. An even bigger catch is that our farm doesn’t have any available broadband wifi options. We are relying instead on a 4G LTE Modem to provide service, utilizing a chimney mounted antenna to amplify the cellular signal. But the Netgear modem doesn’t actually work with the repeater antenna, for reasons unknown, but our Verizon (also Netgear) Jetpack portable hotspot does… So this weekend I spent time using the Jetpack to tether to an ASUS router (instructions on that here), then using that router to connect the weather station to wifi.
Now if I could just figure out how to make a fancy dashboard on this blog, live streaming the data, that would be really cool… Maybe I’ll settle for a weather sticker in the meantime.
And now I’ve learned you can’t put html objects into a blog post, so the sticker will have to appear as a link to another site:
http://www.wunderground.com/swf/Rapid_Fire.swf?units=metric&station=KMNWABAS11