Troy Lass <[email protected]> writes: > Over the years I seem to get signal quality at 0, often. I'm not moving > the console, in fact I get the same thing on a console and a envoy in the > same location. > > The console is approximately 25 feet from the station and I can see the > station in a clear line of sight from the console.
So 25 feet line of sight means that the path loss (difference between power into the tx antenna and power coming out of the rx antenna, more or less) is almost certainly not an issue. I mean that if the transmitter is working, and there is no strong interfering signal, then this should be solid. I have a VP2 with the console about that distance away, but with maybe 2 walls in between. I see spikes from 100% down to maybe 99% mostly and 96% once over a month, maybe twice over a year. Given that two base stations are seeing the same problems, there are three hypotheses: A) The transmitter is failing to transmit correctly B) There is some interfering signal C) Both receivers are defective in a similar way D) Something else we don't understand (always there, but good to list) In my experience, when a Davis ISS has transmitting issues due to power, it will stop when it's cold, or dark, and then start again when it warms up or gets sun. Your pattern doesn't fit that. So this doesn't smell like A to be. C seems very unlikely. For B, this does not strike me as a bizarre situation. There is a tremendous amount of badly-designed and badly-built electronics that radiates energy where it should not. I have a friend who had signal dropouts with an Acurite station in one location, not closely matching yours, but similar in that they were occasional and inexplicable. After the entired station was moved (well over 10 km, to an essentially uncorrelated 433 MHz environment), there were no dropouts. So I don't find your situation surprising. The Davis signal (assuming VP2) hops in frequency, to avoid narrowband interference. I am unclear on the VP(1) signal. So it looks like, if interference, that it's fairly broad band. In the US, this is in the 915 Mhz range. This link may be useful, and there may be a maintained version somewhere: https://github.com/bemasher/rtldavis This is also interesting: https://madscientistlabs.blogspot.com/2010/12/davis-weather-station-hacking.html https://madscientistlabs.blogspot.com/2014/02/build-your-own-davis-weather-station_17.html Overall, I suggest that you get an RTL-SDR dongle and use gqrx to look at what's going on in the radio spectrum. You should be able to see the transmit pulses, and I believe that broadband interference will appear very differently from weak transmit pulses. I would recommend that you get a dongle with a metal case, an SMA connector, and a TCXO. I've used ones like: https://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers.html?sdr_usb_ic=34 to receive 433 MHz signals from eg. acurite sensors, but have not tried to listen to Davis. Another thing to try is to unplug everything in your house that you can deal with being unplugged overnight and see if that helps. You may have a defective switched-mode power supply wall wart or semothing. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "weewx-user" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/weewx-user/rmi8sl9yq0z.fsf%40s1.lexort.com.
