There are numerous applications in our everyday life where knowing the weather conditions would improve the quality or safety of life, as well as aiding productivity. However, often meteorological measurements are seen as time consuming, expensive and requiring too much expertise in order to be a common practice. Telecommunications in the form of getting meteorological data from remote places, is also frequently considered expensive and difficult to arrange.
Vaisala’s automatic weather stations (AWS) have been designed to overcome these obstacles. The MAWS301 station is a new generation weather station especially designed for applications where no commercial power or communication networks are present or economically installed. MAWS301 is a compact, scalable, environmentally robust and low-power system to provide reliable and continuous data on a board range of meteorological and hydrological parameters. It is based on the latest technology both in measurements and communication. MAWS301 interfaces with a variety of telecommunication equipment such as PSTN and GSM modems and UHF radio modems, as well as satellite transmitters.
For weather forecasting or for early warning of bad weather, the data is also required from very remote places, where no commercial telecommunication services exist. Also, the locations may often be beyond cellular coverage or in valleys shadowed by mountains. There are also applications where the reliability of the communication is a major issue under emergency situations such as severe flooding or bush fires. In these applications the UFH radio communication has proved to be the most economical and reliable way of transmitting valuable meteorological data.
Vaisala has successfully incorporated Satel’s SATELLINE-3AS radio modems in the MAWS systems. For portable research and tactical meteorological systems, the companies collaborated to develop a lightweight but robust weather enclosure for SATELLINE-3AS, which allows a quick, easy and cost effective equipment development, even under difficult weather and operating conditions.
When using UHF radio modems in the weather stations networks the data can be transmitted at virtually no cost, even to several different users of the data. One single weather station can serve as a repeater for several other stations, thus extending the communication path to tens of kilometres. Modern radio modems such as SATELLINE-3AS are well suited for applications where a solar panel is used for powering the entire weather station.
For more information contact Grant Joyce, Lapp Kabel, +27 (0)11 201 3200, [email protected], www.lappcable.co.za
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