Any other mobile users?

My Sky and Air are mounted on my car roof for measurements on the road (I’m a meteorologist). Is anyone else doing something similar?

My only issues so far has been the Sky sometimes not connecting with the hub, and with mobile vibrations tricking the Sky haptic sensor into thinking I’m in torrential rain (and not much wind). I have tried to secure things a bit better, which yielded more common 80+ mph wind measurements while in motion, as it should be.

FYI, I’m not so interested in measurements while in motion vs. those when I’m stopped, so I’ve had no reason to want to calibrate the unit to try and remove mobile speed from the wind measurements as people do when running so-called mobile mesonets in coordinated field observations.

The Air is inside an inexpensive shield of my own making, mounted with PVC and a painted plastic dome with air holes. It has no fan, but is obviously “aspirated” just fine at highway speeds and my primary interest is measurements stopped in cloudy conditions, so I’m not too concerned about that (so far).

My main concerns have been minimizing vibration and keeping the Air out of the rain, and on both counts - so far, mostly so good.

Brian
air_before_painting roof_mount

3 Likes

Nice setup :slight_smile:

Do you have any damping elements in your roof top construction ?

Hi @bfjewett,
I mounted the Sky to my car to test the speed calibration because several of us were not believing the output.
I used my mobile phone as a wifi hotspot and everything worked correctly.
GOPR2015

It did record lots of rain due to vibrations so I then carried out lots of different testing to determine which types of vibrations and mounting arrangements cause false rain. This forum has lots of discussion about that but my mount below is the only thing I have read to actually remove false rain from a vibrating mount. There was a moment while I was holding the simple pole out of the roof of a convertible car when it didnt record false rain at speed. So I tried unsuccessfully to replicate the angle but could not repeat the period without false rain.
So then I worked on different mounts. This mount is on a very vibrating pole but only records false rain sometimes at around 40 knots. The rubber that does most of the dampening are rubber cone adaptors used in Australia to connect a toilet to the sewer. After nearly 12 months they are cracking so I might need to replace them and paint the rubber to stop UV. The center pipe also is filled with potting mix because I didnt have sand at the time.

And the mount is held at its center of wind resistance so that strong winds dont tip it over.

During my driving test after weatherflow corrected an error it seemed to read accurately. The error at that time caused the speed to drop to almost nothing after about a minute of constant speed. We would be interested to hear how well the calibration is to your GPS speed.

cheers Ian :slight_smile:

2 Likes

I tried including some padding but not sure how to balance durability, toughness and vibration. It has to survive small rocks kicked up by passing cars - if possible. I’ve considered using these vibration pads - somehow.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B012AFHMQW/?coliid=I3L5HAK17GD4CL&colid=FWHQW3PCIAU6&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

There is a rubber roof paint which would stay flexible that might work to preserve them.