After finding the radio interference problem caused by a plug in power supply unit, (link to Thread), this also caused power quality issues to the Blitzortung lightning detector to which it was powering, here we have a before and after traces of background noise:

Pulses caused the automatic gain to be reduced, effecting the detection range.

Considerable improvement of signal quality.

Lightning detection trace, this trace was captured during the storm activity in the image below.

The green squares indicate stations online, the grey squares are stations that are currently offline.

Data has to be accurate and reliable, this is especially true of weather data, Chatteris Weather uploads in ‘Rapid Fire’ mode its data status for a whole range of variables every 2.5 seconds, this allows the gauges and wind speed and direction to seem so responsive, so how do you when the site its not updating or putting it another way, how do you know if the data is stale?

Here at Chatteris Weather, we use three ways (excluding the status update page).

First –

If the site is going to be down for maintenance, we will post up description and predicted down-time, this message will be displayed in a yellow warning box at the top of each page.

Second –

The Weather PC uploads a changed file each and every time, this file is called clientraw, a script within the weather template compares the time of last clientraw arrival with the current time, if no change has taken place, a yellow alert box will open on the home page and it will say that an error has occurred and the clientraw file has not updated for x minutes.

This works really well, however, as I have an older PC running numerous weather related programs, when one which is particularly heavy on processing starts, the clientraw error might appear until this program finishes and PC resource are again available, an example of a short duration, but high processor usage is the creation of the movie files used in the time-lapse playback pages.

It may well be that clicking on refresh, will clear the error message.

The clientraw error message is fine to let site visitors know of a problem, but I need to know if something’s not right without constantly being sat on the site, I have done this in a number of ways, one is using a free service provided by Pingdom, this checks the accessibility of Chatteris Weather and sends me an e-mail if it gets no response, I have set the check time to every 15 minutes, the downside to this method is that Pingdom has to visit the site in order to determine if its available and consequently my ‘Whos-Online’ script counts it as a visitor, hence installing the RevolverMap as this discounts these ‘bot’ visits.

Example of Pingdom status report.

Pingdom alert e-mail examples (The check-time was originally set to 1 minute before I relaised the impact on visitor numbers) –

PingdomAlert DOWN:
Http://www.chatteris.biz (www.chatteris.biz) is down since 12/08/2014 08:49:37AM.

PingdomAlert UP:
Http://www.chatteris.biz (www.chatteris.biz) is UP again at 12/08/2014 08:58:37AM, after 9m of downtime.

Third –

An additional way of alerting site visitors is with script ‘Flatline-check.php’, this offers an alert message to site visitors that a problem exists and that it has been escalated, this script not only reads the clientraw file, but crosschecks that certain key sensors are working, it does this by creating a file called flatline-status.txt, this file display a range of readings:-

1) Average Wind Speed
3) Wind Direction
4) Outside Temperature
6) Barometer
72) Dew Point Temperature

The parameter numbers relate to clientraw table as above. Every 30 minutes a schedule (cron job) runs on the Go Daddy server which compares the latest ‘flatline-status.txt’ file to the earlier version, if they have changed indicating a healthy upload, no action is taken, if a problem is detected i.e. no changes made, I get an alerting e-mail, the next time data is refreshed, I get a further e-mail informing me that service has been restored.

‘Flatline-status.php’ actual alert e-mails –

Weather Data Appears Flatlined.
01-03-15 2:16 pm now. Last data change recorded at 01-03-15 1:35 pm (0.0 26 3.9 1017.1 3.2)

Weather Data Back Online.
Back active at 01-03-15 3:14 pm (4.1 329 4.2 1018.9 3.4)

Alert messages – this was after a planned power outage.

The top message was generated by ‘clientraw.php’ script, the lower messages based on ‘Flatlines-status.php’ would have appeared some 27 minutes later followed by an alerting e-mail, these are the ones pasted above.

Well, that’s how I do it so hopefully the data displayed is current, if not, at least two of us will know 😉

I’ve noticed over the last few weeks, that every now and again the menubar, which is on the left side of the web page, has generated a string of errors which clear after a short while. The script responsible was ‘worldextremesGadet.php’ which uses the web site ogimet.com to gather UK weather highs and lows, after about the third time of this happening I started looking around for an alternative in case it fails completely.

I noticed a number of other private weather station sites displaying the same data derived from the UK Met Office, so after searching WXForum, I found the scripts and installed them, after re-reading the forum thread and making the required changes, everything is now working as before, but with the addition of the sunniest place in the UK information (not that it matters at this time of the year!).

UK Extremes located in the Menubar – (Image only in case you were wondering why it hasn’t updated!).

Martin from Hebwx wrote a small script which I have also incorporated, this automatically changes the year used for the copyright notification and also brings in the Met Office Logo which is a nice addition.

Published 30/12/2014

Chatteris Weather has been online for a year on the 28th December 2014, or should I say, been online using a template of Saratoga Weather, combined with the URL of Chatteris.biz and a new web host in e-rice.

My original site was hosted by Talktalk, one a new host was sorted, all the original files regarding build details etc, were transferred.

Over the past year lots of modifications and tweaks have been done (and continue to be done) to keep the site as bug free as possible and to keep on top of dead links, sometimes pages or complete scripts have to be disabled to maintain the site in working order, I decide to revisit the effected scripts and see what could be done, tackling the script “Who-Online” first.

The script ‘Whos-Online’ required a GeoLiteCity upgrade file to be installed every month, during last months update the SQL database became corrupt causing the weather site to fail, I was reluctant to upgrade to a higher script version as the original one took a lot of effort to get working, however, no other option existed and I upgraded from V2.25 to V 3.00.

With the help of wxforum members, the new script is now working, I also took the opportunity to attach a table showing the nation flags of visitors. (Update – The flag table would only register visitors who visited the page with the table on it, I have changed to Revelovermaps as this allowed me to link the small globe in the menu bar to the main display on the Whos-Online page so no matter which page is viewed, it is included within the counter)

During the process of installing ‘Whos-Online’ I noticed that the cloud height graphic was not being displayed on the pages where it is used – Cloud Type Page – for example, this was found to be linked to an error generated in the weather templates Setting.php script, the cloud graphic script -cloud-base.php – can work without the link to Settings.php as data can be called from other sources, as soon as Settings.php was commented out, the graphic came back online.

So two results in one, happy birthday Chatteris Weather 🙂