As I now care a lot more about the weather, in particular wind speed and direction, for flying at Lincoln, Dad got me an Oregon Scientific weather station. Having found out that the manual sucks, I followed everybody else and downloaded the Radio Shack version.

I'm started off using FreeWXWi on a netbook running Windows XP to upload to Weather Underground, but later set up a Raspberry Pi running WView to just look after this.

My data's here.

The console can be mounted anywhere. I've screwed it to the wall in the office so I can look at it when I'm "working".

The external temperature gauge needs to be out of the sun and weather, so it's mounted under the eaves of the roof. It often reads a few degrees lower than the dumb old thermometer that I screwed to the wall in the sun :o)

The internal temperature gauge can sit anywhere. I got another one of these and mounted it in the roof so I know when to run the house fan - I can still add another 2, but I don't know where I'd put them.

The anemometer mounts to a standard TV aerial mast, and is on the crest of the roof. Dad and I are both afraid of heights, so this was an absolute joy to get up there.

The rain gauge was sitting on a little shelf we built for it, but it was shaded by the house, so it wasn't that accurate yet. I ended up bolting it to a sheet of plywood and putting it on top of the patio cover. I can easily reach it from the top of the ladder, and it shouldn't pick up too many leaves here. I've had it register 0.08" on a drizzly day, so I'm pretty sure it's accurate now :o)

After over 10 years of sterling service, things started to fail - the outdoor thermometer failed, and was replaced with a simple battery operated one, but when the rain gauge failed, I figured it was time for a total update. I got an Ambient Weather WS-1001, which does its thing wirelessly to a colour display, and sends everything to Weather Underground without needing a computer in the middle. This is pretty much the same as the unit that Dad's running in the UK.

Usefully, the display takes 5V at 1A, so I made up a new power cable so I could power it from a USB adapter, rather than yet another bloody wall wart.

After another 5 or 6 years, the console failed, so I ordered an Ambient Weather WS-2000. One of the best points is that it uses the same protocols as the WS-1000 series, so I didn't have to get up on the roof and replace the sensors... I also have a spare sensor suite for when that fails - the sun kills things here.