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The System comprises:
Weather Station: The club’s weather station is the Davis Vantage Pro2. This station is a mid range cabled station providing data for:
- atmospheric pressure
- indoor and outdoor temperature
- indoor and outdoor humidity
- windspeed and direction
- rainfall
The weather station has now been installed at the club, and is displaying live data from the clubhouse. The station comprises four instruments:
- The combined indoor temperature, humidity and pressure meter
- The combined outdoor temperature and humidity meter
- The anemometer and wind direction monitor
- The rain gauge
These instruments connect directly to the station console. The cabled option has been chosen following problems with the wireless transmission through the steel roof of the clubhouse.
The console provides both an LCD display of the readings from the instruments and a data link to the Weather Server running VWS. This data can then be manipulated in a number of ways to provide the information to the web site.
VWS: VWS provides the interface with the weather station and is able to analyse and present the data in various forms and hold data for presentation in graphical form. VWS is a very extensive and detailed product. Suitable images from VWS have been incorporated in the pages of the web site. These images are generated and uploaded to the site at 10 minute intervals.
WeatherFlash: WxFlash is used to interface with VWS to enable Macromedia Flash components embedded in the web site to continually update. It does this by converting raw data from VWS into a form that can be transmitted to the website in small chunks. The data is converted by the web server to manipulate the web images. These images are only created in the user’s browser and therefore use very little of the site resources. A variety of images can be displayed and these will be selected to provide information on potential sailing conditions.
Weather Server: The club’s weather server is a desktop PC running Windows XP Professional. The PC spec includes an Intel Dual Core processor, 2Gb RAM, 320Gb HDD and LAN card. The LAN network is distributed by a Netgear DG834G ADSL Modem Wireless Router.
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