A little about our station...

The station is owned by Tom Forrest, N4GVK of Greensboro, NC.

The weather station used for this site is the Davis Vantage Pro2 with the fan-aspirated radiation shield.

You can read more about the Davis station here

Data is fed into a Compaq Presario, 160 Gig HD for plenty of data storage, running an AMD processor. Data from the weather instruments are sent to the computer every 2.5 seconds. Updates to the internet are made every few minutes to many various weather gathering points around the country.

Data is also transmitted over the APRS Ham radio network.

The station is owned by Tom Forrest, N4GVK

How I got started in weather gathering...

Years ago my father, who was a great "gadget builder", decided to build his own weather instruments. This was circa 1964. Weather instruments were only available to professionals like major TV stations and government facilities. He constructed the anneometer from brass toilet floats cut in half and brass welding rods on a small DC toy motor. This would generate current to a 0-1 Mil. meter. He calibrated the wind system by mounting it on the top of his car and riding down the road at specified speeds. It was amazing how accurate this was.

The direction indicator was brass and it was two surplus sylsen motors. It was all in a enclosure small enough to sit on top of our TV in a fancy walnut enclosure. This worked well and accurate for many years. Unfortunately, I have no photos of the system. He even came up with a large magnifying rain gauge that was a glass tube with a reflective red strip behind it and large numerals. A project that didn't get far off the drawing board was a hunidity gauge, using human hair. It didn't really work as well as he thought, but it was worth a try.

I have always been interested in weather from those days in 1964. Technology has come a long way!

This site is dedicated to my father's memory and his love for weather.

Jess Tom Forrest 1928-2005