What to do, what to do?

Acquiring a weather station was the first step.
There were many models available ranging from simple plastic units that required manual reading to professional sensing and monitoring equipment retailing in the five and six figure range. It obviously had to be a "weather hobbyist" type of instrument, but it also had to be able to talk to a computer.

Factoid. Weather stations are available locally from Radio Shack, RWS Services, and C. Crane Company.

Putting it on the Internet.
In September of 1997, a brand new Oregon Scientific WX-200 was properly installed in the vicinity of the Redwood Village Shopping Center. The station interfaced very nicely with a dedicated 286 but spent the first couple of years playing to an audience of only two. There were several attempts to put meaningful weather data on the Net, but these required a rather large amount of effort for the small amount of returned results. Information, when available, was sporadic, usually out of date, and, in general, pretty useless.

Besides frustration with the existing software, several other factors had to be resolved, including local bandwidth volume and connection time, the http server's restricted programming, and upload/download traffic allowances. Incidentally, this writer has promised that nothing would be mentioned about the webmaster's level of programming and parsing skills.

Putting it on the Internet Part II, ten minute updates!
Eventually, the machine's web site was moved to the popular Springville server. An aging but robust '486 was rebuilt and conscripted into the weather service. Software that did not require the skills of a rocket scientist was acquired, and in July of 1999, two years after the station was first installed, the beta site again went sort of almost live. After a few weeks of mayhem, disorder and general pandemonium, the system taught management how it actually wished to be configured if it was going to run by itself, and it then settled down pretty well, uploading a megabit of data to the Springville web server every hour. Updates were being made every ten minutes!

Putting it on the Internet Part III, we're live!
Two years later, in August 2001, a PII server with a 128 kilobit line allowed the weather station to go live. Due to its popularity, the ISP upload connection became a bottleneck and the web site was returned to the commercial server a year later. In 2004 the station's computer was upgraded to a P4 with a gig of memory.

And we added the web cams with live images!
In the spring of 2001 an Axis 2120 camera with a built-in Linux server was purchased and it is uploading pictures from various areas in Fortuna. This camera is being used to showcase Fortuna's festivals and events. The summer of 2003 saw a new camera installed at River Lodge. Starting in 2004, the Fortuna Event-O-Rama had as many as three cams at once uploading views of the festivities.

Moving and an Upgrade
In 2004 the station was moved to the vicinity of the Rohnerville Airport, and a few years later the WX-200 was upgraded to a Davis Vantage Pro2.

Using the latest software, the station processes over 20,000 weather readings and hundreds of files every 24 hours. This little robot operates at top form, constantly and dutifully updating its thrifty web site with the local weather conditions, river levels, forecasts and reports.

So, OK, all this is nice, but you're keeping me in suspense, how did the Navy do with their "Fog, Intensive, Dispersal Of" thing? And are you sure there's not really a dog?

More about FIDO.
Hey, I'm glad you asked. Here's the story about FIDO.

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