A new battery is in the weather station and all is good again. Maybe the rain gauge is always the first to go when the battery on the Vantage Vue is on the way out.

Of course, and welcomingly, the rain has stopped so I can't actually confirm that the rain gauge is OK but all looks good with a little test of droplets.

No reported rain for the last 24 hrs, despite it pissing down. When it all clears I'll hop up on the roof and check it out for debris (and or batteries).

I've moved the webcam again, pointing it due East - it is a much better view.

But alas, the USB extension cable have deteriorated the quality significantly. I thought it would affect motion quality but since I'm not using full motion, only snapshots, I thought it would be OK. I'm going to try a small, better quality cable

The rain has finally stopped so I hopped up on the roof to look at the problematic rain gauge on the Vantage Vue. I took it all apart, no blockages that I could see. Made sure that it was all moving freely (I probably should have put some grease on) and put it back on.

It rained slightly last night and the rain was captured

Sorry folks. Here we are in a nice significant rain event and my rain gauge is not reporting!

It probably is just some debris in the collector but I'll have to wait for the rain to stop as my wife thinks I shouldn't hop up on the roof when it's pissing down. (Something about safety).

Stay tuned.

Moved my desk and server so the webcam has moved. At the moment it is pointing almost directly north but when I get my act together and get a USB extension cable (or find one - there must be one here somewhere ) I'll point it east wards so we can see the ocean (but alas not the waves - too many houses have built out our view).

I hope

Over the last few months I have had problems with the Vantage Vue batteries that were failing at about dawn. The Vantage Vue uses solar during the day and batteries overnight which are supposed to last about 18 months.

I'd already replaced the battery in January but it started to fail during May. I don't know if it was a dodgy battery of

The Background

When I first started storing data for this website, the software I used was wview (http://wviewweather.com) a pretty good and flexible solution for collecting the data from my Davis Station Vantage Vue.

I've recently moved a lot of my

It's not just the tides for Merewether but its the tides for Newcastle (which, lets face it, is pretty close). So you could use it for Stockton, Nobbys, Newcastle Beach, Bar Beach / Cooks Hill, Dixon Park Beach, etc.

The Merewether Tides are generated using data massaged from the brilliant program XTide 

I have updated the software that I use to update the website from my Davis Station Vantage Vue.

I am part of the way through the change from my old Linux box to a nice, small, power efficient Mac Mini Server.

The first problem was getting the Mac to talk to the Davis Station data logger. Instead of getting the Davis Weatherlink