shaman
Member
KYHillChick presented me with a weather station for my birthday. Details are here:
The Weather Widget
I've been wanting one of these since forever, but the prices for personal weather stations was crazy. She got this one for $120 off Amazon. It is the least expensive out there that would report data to the Internet. I got it set up back in town and calibrated it to a $650 station that was less than a mile from the house. That $650 station is not as responsive as this one.
So what does this have to do with deer hunting, Shaman?
A lot of things, really.
1) SW Bracken County KY is crawling with deer and crawling with hunters during season. However, The closest weather station is 10 miles away. Local conditions vary wildly-- wind especially. This lets me know exactly what's going on at camp and it delivers it to any smartphone. It also fills a hole in the map where there has not been data collected previously. There's well over a thousand deer hunters that will be looking at their smart phones this fall, and finding out the weather in Greater Browningsville. It's actually a poplular site already. The station by the house at home had 50 hits in the first two weeks of July. My station at the farm had twice as many.
2) As patriarch of deer camp, it is my job to keep the log. We have data on every deer taken here since the camp's inception, including barometric, temperature and wind conditions. The closest station that archives its data is on the east side of Cincinanti, so if I waited a week to make my log entry, I had to extrapolate from data collected 40 miles away. Having the station means I can pull up data from not only the five-minute window of each kill, but also the whole of deer season.
3) Things like rainfall need to be tracked as close as possible to get an accurate picture. It may dump two inches of rain at Falmouth or Brooksville and we don't get a drop. In the summer, I'm trying to figure out when to come down and mow. In the winter, I'm trying to decide if it's safe to drive the roads.
4) When I'm at camp my smartphone registered wildly differing results. On the front porch, I was in Berry, KY. In the back, I was in Brooksville. If I was up in my stand on the back of the property, I was considered in Milford. The Greater Browningsville Station is now a single pin on the map. When we hit the locator button, that's what it reports. It's a bit of a fiction; Browningsville fell off the maps before 1900, but it is the closest place name I could find. Well, sort of. The town of Ely existed just over on the next ridge. The name showed up on a 1858 railroad map I found. My buddy O.T. remembered an ambandoned store there as a kid. I like the name Browningsville and I'm proud to be part of the Greater Browningsville-Neave Metroplex. Neave? That's the closest active place name in my county. Closer? There's Bachelor's Rest, but that's across the line in Pendleton County. You see my dilemma.
The Weather Widget
I've been wanting one of these since forever, but the prices for personal weather stations was crazy. She got this one for $120 off Amazon. It is the least expensive out there that would report data to the Internet. I got it set up back in town and calibrated it to a $650 station that was less than a mile from the house. That $650 station is not as responsive as this one.
So what does this have to do with deer hunting, Shaman?
A lot of things, really.
1) SW Bracken County KY is crawling with deer and crawling with hunters during season. However, The closest weather station is 10 miles away. Local conditions vary wildly-- wind especially. This lets me know exactly what's going on at camp and it delivers it to any smartphone. It also fills a hole in the map where there has not been data collected previously. There's well over a thousand deer hunters that will be looking at their smart phones this fall, and finding out the weather in Greater Browningsville. It's actually a poplular site already. The station by the house at home had 50 hits in the first two weeks of July. My station at the farm had twice as many.
2) As patriarch of deer camp, it is my job to keep the log. We have data on every deer taken here since the camp's inception, including barometric, temperature and wind conditions. The closest station that archives its data is on the east side of Cincinanti, so if I waited a week to make my log entry, I had to extrapolate from data collected 40 miles away. Having the station means I can pull up data from not only the five-minute window of each kill, but also the whole of deer season.
3) Things like rainfall need to be tracked as close as possible to get an accurate picture. It may dump two inches of rain at Falmouth or Brooksville and we don't get a drop. In the summer, I'm trying to figure out when to come down and mow. In the winter, I'm trying to decide if it's safe to drive the roads.
4) When I'm at camp my smartphone registered wildly differing results. On the front porch, I was in Berry, KY. In the back, I was in Brooksville. If I was up in my stand on the back of the property, I was considered in Milford. The Greater Browningsville Station is now a single pin on the map. When we hit the locator button, that's what it reports. It's a bit of a fiction; Browningsville fell off the maps before 1900, but it is the closest place name I could find. Well, sort of. The town of Ely existed just over on the next ridge. The name showed up on a 1858 railroad map I found. My buddy O.T. remembered an ambandoned store there as a kid. I like the name Browningsville and I'm proud to be part of the Greater Browningsville-Neave Metroplex. Neave? That's the closest active place name in my county. Closer? There's Bachelor's Rest, but that's across the line in Pendleton County. You see my dilemma.
