Cumulus Support

I have a Ambient (Fine Offset) WS-1090. I've been having odd issues for the past two weeks with my almost 2 month old unit. It ran fine for the first 6 weeks, no issues, and now I'm getting odd readings. I initinally thought it was batteries, so I replaced the barley month old alkalines with a fresh pair of Lithium's.

Every other day it seems I keep getting one or two odd readings. My station is located less than 20ft (6-7m) almost line of sight from the sensors/transmitter. The problem occurs typically overnight, but has happened once or twice during the day. I will get 3-5 errors of "loss sensor contact" about a minute apart in Cumulus, and my station's LCD will read "--" for temperature, humidity, wind and such. I'm okay with ocassional signal loss as it only happens once a day. However, the thing that gets me is on the first error, Cumulus gets a odd reading. Most of the time it will report a temperature much lower than the actual temperature (Ex if its 50F out, it has given me 10F, 20F, -10F readings randomly) as well as odd humidity readings (Ex if its 90% humidity out, sometimes it will jump to 10%, the lowest reading for the sensor, but others sometimes just some random number like 20% or 30%.). I thought it was just a issue with the temperature/humidity sensor, until I got the same issue with wind. So far this week on a calm day with winds bellow 2mph, I got a "25mph" gust, and a 97mph gust.

It gets very annoying as every other day now I have to go through and edit Cumulus's recorded data, and All Time, Month, and Year Record High/Lows, as well as Today.ini to reset all my statistics from these odd readings. Typically because of just the humidity, temperature, and wind being off, I have to reset Temperature, Humidity, Dew Point, Apparent Temperature, Heat Index, Wind Chill, Wind Speed, Wind Gust.

I am trying to figure out what is causing this. I'm almost positive it's not signal interfierence, as I have absolutely no other devices that operate at 915mhz. (Phones run in 5.8ghz spread, Wifi 2.4ghz/5.8ghz). The only devices in that remote operation band is GSM cell phones which sometimes use that, (Quad band 850/900/1700/1800mhz). However this occurs when no one is home (and no cell phones present). Could this possibly be a issue with my sensor/transmitter unit?

Also some since feature I think that might be nice. In addition to the "Spike" removal feature in Cumulus, something simular to it might be nice to add that could remove drastic changes. Such us ignore any data like temperature spikes, if it anything more than say X degrees difference from last reading, ignore data. (Same with dew point and humidity). It would be hard to do with wind speed, but it would work well for humidity/temperature.

Thanks in advance for any advice you guys might have.

WoodburyMan wrote:Also some since feature I think that might be nice. In addition to the "Spike" removal feature in Cumulus, something simular to it might be nice to add that could remove drastic changes. Such us ignore any data like temperature spikes, if it anything more than say X degrees difference from last reading, ignore data. (Same with dew point and humidity). It would be hard to do with wind speed, but it would work well for humidity/temperature.

I don't understand what it is you're asking for. What you're describing is exactly how the spike removal facility works.

Oh. The way I understood the spike removal when I looked at it was it ignored values above/bellow a threshold, like say ignore values of 255 or 999 etc. I didn't know it could do things like ignore anything that's X (set degrees) off from last reading.(Ex. It's 80F out, and all of a sudden the sensor gets a reading of 55F. I want Cumulus to ignore that) It looks like I have to review that feature a bit more and play with it when I get home.

I'm not so concerened with that as per my WS-1090 getting all these interuptions though. I remembered shortly after posting that we have both a old LaCross, and old Oregon Scientific Outdoor Temp/Humidity sensor onyyyyyy our back portch and side portch. Both use 433mhz but I disconnected them to see if they might be causing issues.

I've looked over the calibration / spike settings.
It seems even with the main settings for the station set to F, MPH, in (Rain), and in (pressure), the spike removal settings are still in C, m/s, mm and mb. Should I just enter converted metric measurement in? (Ex if I want 20F difference spike removal, enter 11.111C in under Temperature? (.5555C to every degree F, .44704m/s per each mph, 25.4mm per inch (rain), 0.3386mb per .01in (pressure, etc)

Yes. Have you looked at the help? It says that you have to enter the values in the native units of the weather station, as shown on the calibration screen.

steve wrote:Yes. Have you looked at the help? It says that you have to enter the values in the native units of the weather station, as shown on the calibration screen.

Have now, thanks for the help! I got everything set correctly on the spike removal feature now all in metric units. (Temp: 11.1C, Wind Gust: 9.0m/s, Wind Speed: 9.0m/s, Humidity: 10.0%, Pressure: 5.1mb, Max Rain Rate: 254.0mm, Max Hourly Rain: 127.0mm.... Which is roughly 20F, 20mph, 0.15in mercury, 10in, 5in in US units)

Also, my original issues seems to have fixed itself. It's been over 24 hours and I have not had a single transmission error at all since unplugging and removing batteries from the other device in my house. I'll wait and see though, if it goes more then three days I'll call the issue solved.