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> weather station that reports temp/humidity/lignthing strikes/rain amount/wind speed+direction, and lux

Do you get this information from radio waves? would love to know more about your setup.



Not OP but the idea is simple: You put transmitters somewhere outdoor (or wherever you want to measure) plop a battery in there and be set for a few years.

Such weather stations were really commonplace 20 years ago, I remember my grandparents having a sensor outside and a basic LCD display in the kitchen displaying the outdoor temperature and humidity. These days we want that data digitally on our phones or home assistant so you need a receiver that talks TCP/ip and runs a real os. That's where the SDR comes in to bridge the gap between primitive RF Tech and modern computing. Of course you could also put an esp8266 outdoors, which natively talks wifi, but then you lose range and your battery life goes from years to weeks.


Apparently 433mhz environmental sensors is a whole category: https://www.amazon.com/wireless-433Mhz-weather-sensors-Home-...


433MHz is attractive because it's low frequency allows it to propogare farther with less energy input than higher freqs (900MHz; 2.4GHz) would need and does not suffer from nearly as much reflection off of obstacles thanks to that longer wave.

There are several frequency ranges in the US that are unlicensed for transmission. But don't confuse unlicensed with a lack of rules governing what you are allowed to transmit; how often you can transmit and for how long. Because you can plop a 433MHz transceiver into anything, you want to be careful that you're not clogging up the local airwaves by not knowing to know the rules. Also, most smart meters (near me anyway) operat in this band sending out pulses every so often. They mesh together to relay the data towards a central collector. Thanks to that low frequency, hundreds of meters can be visible at times showing up as tiny chirps all over this area of the spectrum. Unfortunately this also means that some cheap receivers (just looking for any signal on a very specific frequency in that range, can be randomly triggered by this 'noise'. But also, because it's used by utilities, to want to make sure they don't end up having an issue with meter readings because you began running a wifi link over 433MHz.


This is a tool for receiving a lot of 433MHz stuff: https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433


They're using weather stations that broadcast on 433MHz around their property and receive those messages with their SDR, then they pipe that into their database and display system.




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