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Ham Radio Mississippi

Work on weather station – two new trash cans

[Yesterday (friday): 3.5 miles]

Today I finally dug into the autonomous weather station to see why it kept dying on me.  I had been having to reboot it periodically.  This week I’ve watched the log files more closely and I set it up to automatically reboot every day around noon.  About half the time it would not find the sensor unit serial port and I’d get no readings.  Then if I rebooted manually it would work OK.

So I finally decided to dig into it and see if there were any obvious hardware problems.  I got it all opened up.  I took the sensor unit off and took it into the house for examination.

I didn’t find anything seriously wrong.  One of the power wires to the sensor unit (the -) looked like it might be a bit dodgy.  So I cleaned that up with no problem and I got it all back together and mounted on the pole again.  The pole has warped quite a bit, so I put in some spacers to get the sensor unit plumb and level again (by eye).

Now the readings are coming in and it seems to be doing a good job.  I think I have improved it, but we will have to wait and see how it goes.


We also went into town today and stopped at Tractor Supply where I bought two new Rubbermaid garbage cans.  We have three old ones which were store-brand, probably from Lowes.  And those were getting crispy from being in the sun and the bottoms are very worn from where I drag them out the driveway to put them in place for trash pickup day.

I was wondering how to throw away the old ones, how do you signal to the garbage man that you don’t want it back this time?  But when I got home I broke one of them up easily, it was so brittle.  I’ll get the other two old ones broken up eventually.