Weather Watching and Radio: Natural Bedfellows
RadioUser editor Georg Wiessala explores different ways of obtaining weather information using your radio and PC, looking at weather maps and images, Fax and RTTY, aviation and maritime weather forecasts.
Ithink it is probably fair to say that most amateur radio operators and radio enthusiasts also have a healthy interest in the changing weather in these Isles and beyond. Next to radios and accessories, weather stations, I am reliably informed, are among the bestsellers of many of our radio traders and advertisers.
I often hear about new models available to the hobby market. At the time of writing, for example, Peter Waters G3OJV, from Waters & Stanton, has written in about the new Watson W-8686, offering Wi-Fi functionality and a colour screen. It will be reviewed in full in a forthcoming issue of RadioUser.
There are some weather-and-radiorelated posts on our Radio Enthusiast website too.
Last but not least – and delving into the archives– I find that the weather forms a recurring thread in the rich annual tapestry of our magazines, as do some other, related, subjects.
Overall, the most pertinent one of those seems to be propagation, space weather, and the ionosphere.
However, the areas of ’weather’ and ‘radio’ have also overlapped in many of our (and PW’s) articles on Maritime and Space Communications, ‘Natural’ Radio, VLF Studies and History, to name but a few.
Details of all the articles mentioned here, and some more, are indicated in Table 1, later on in this article. a variety of ways, and without going to any great expense.
As in many other areas of the radio hobby, much of this comes down to personal preferences – some of you might prefer the more traditional ways of weather watching, using ‘legacy-equipment’ (i.e. radios with knobs on). Alternatively, you might be captivated by the possibilities of more recent technology, such as SoftwareDefined Radios (SDR) or weather-specific software, such as SeaTTY, JVCom32, Yand, PropLab, Zorns-Lemma 11.4.2, or the comprehensive Digital Atmosphere software suite.
Equipment, Concentric Circles and Case Studies
One final word of introduction: technology has moved on over the last decade. My own ‘state-of-the-art’ radio weather shack just eight years ago relied heavily on an AOR AR7030, a Sony ICF SW77, an ICOM IC-R 20, a Uniden UBC72XLT scanner, and a Roberts Stream WM-202 internet radio, Fig. 2.
Now, I have other HF receivers in my shack, such as the Lowe HF-250, a PURE
Evoke 3 DAB radio, and a later-model Roberts Stream107 internet Radio.
In the ‘SDR corner’, there is an AirSpy HF+ ‘Discovery’ and a new SDRPlay RSPdx.
For VLF observations (of the Sun’s influence on the Ionosphere), I use a VLF loop antenna and antenna tuner from the UK Radio Astronomy Association (UKRAA), a Behringer UMC202HD uPhoria 2x2 192kHz USB Audio Interface, and my PC, with software such as Radio Sky Pipe and Spectrum Lab.
My main ‘weather-radio antennas’ are the Wellbrook ALA150 loop, a new Cross Country Wireless (CCW) loop with an amplifier, occasionally a Tecsun AN-48x, and a Moonraker X1-HF Vertical 1-50MHz trapped coil receiving antenna.
There are, of course, a plethora of other ways and means by which radio amateurs and listening enthusiasts are now able to gather up-to-date weather information, take a look at Table 2.
Many hobbyists think of this in terms of a set of concentric circles, looking at conditions in their home locale first, then at the regional and national picture, and lastly at the wider international trends. Alternatively, you can use a temporal framework and work yourself through a whole day (or night) as I did when I first wrote about this in 2012 and 2015 (see also the reading list in Table 3).
Case Study 1: Portable Radio, Pen and Paper
Let’s begin with pen and paper, shall we? One of my most treasured daily rituals has always been listening to the iconic
such programmes as Gardeners World, Gardeners Question Time, Country File, or (online) at MetCheck, BBC Weather or Accuweather.