Watson W-8681

This unit appears to be made by Fine Offset Electronics. It is either the WH1080 or the WH1081 which to me at least are indistinguishable on their website. I've also seen it sold as Elecsa AstroTouch 6975 by a German seller on eBay. Currently being sold by Maplin as a USB Wireless Weather Forecaster for £79.99 it may become mainstream.

G6KIZ Weather station

I'd been considering adding weather data to the G6KIZ Igate for some time but really couldn't justify the cost. Then M0XDK drew my attention to the Watson W8681 weather station which W&S had announced in their newsletter and were selling on eBay at £95.95 delivered. The features on offer would normally cost at least 3 times more. Obviously there would be some corner cutting but I decided to get one anyway - an interesting gadget regardless of whether or not the data could be pushed into UIView. It arrived by courier next day which was excellent.

The W-8681 sensors

The sensors have to be assembled on the short two section stub mast that is included. This is very easy. Unfortunately two of the leads are much longer than necessary (which probably explains the "There is a generous amount of cable to interconnect the sensors to each other" in the advert. I used zip ties to make as tidy a job of the wiring as possible.

I have some concerns on just how weatherproof the push in modular connectors and battery bay will be. The specs say waterproof to IPX3 which may or may not prove to be good enough.

Two AA batteries need to be fitted and these should last at least two years according to the specs.

Once the sensors were assembled on the stub mast I just zip tied the mast to an 8 foot length of rough cut timber and screwed it to a fence post. The mounting position is a bit of a compromise as it is probably a bit too close to a large conifer for wind direction measurements to be spot on but I doubt that the unit would ever be especially accurate anyway as the vane is very lightweight and completely undamped so the slightest gust sets it swinging.

The W-8681 display unit

Attention now shifted to the quite large display. It transpired that what I thought was a loose protective covering was in fact a faulty membrane that covers the screen to provide the touch screen facility. The unit was returned to W&S for replacement which took over a week to arrive which was far from good and rather took the gloss off the original fast delivery.

It requires three AA batteries which are supposed to last a year. I found that the contrast and backlighting (green LEDs) were both rather poor. M0XDK's had a flickering led - caused by poor quality soldering and OK now he has fixed it. This unit is probably where the inevitable cost cutting is most immediately obvious.

Radio Link

This operates at 868MHz and I was originally concerned that this may be a problem as DigitalHam Towers is an old stone building with walls over two feet thick. It seems so far that I need not have worried as with the new display it has maintained sync.

The unit also has a radio controlled clock. This took an age to sync and when it did showed an hour fast despite the time zone being set correctly. I can only assume that this is a bug and it has added an hour DST despite it being December. I adjusted this manually.

Software

The supplied software automatically adds to an ever growing file with each record being a comma seperated list of values. To get this data into a format acceptable to UIView requires some detective work on what is what and scripting to reformat it. As it happens I have a text editor which can run REXX which I used for this purpose. I doubted that this was mainstream enough to be of any use to other hams so I have now produced a Python script which will create a UIView data file - EasyWeather to UIView script This isn't exactly mainstream either but at least it is open source.

The EasyWeather software has some problems with long term running. I have seen it hang once with an out of resources error. It regularly loses parts of the window furniture and wind direction display. Simply closing it and restarting clears these problems up but it does take a little while to get started again - this delay will probably increase as the internal data buffer fills because the documentation mentions that reading this data from the unit can take a couple of minutes. Changes to the various settings only seem to affect the display and the output data is fixed units - something to be aware of when converting for use in UIView.

Conclusion

So is it worth the money? I'd give that a reserved yes. That may turn to a definite yes providing water ingress or other weather damage doesn't put paid to the sensors. If I hadn't been able to use the data for UIView and was judging the unit just on the display and software I would find it hard to recommend. If your main aim is use as an online weather station and you cannot do the necessary coding you would be advised to avoid this unit until someone has done the work and posted it on the web. I am rather surprised that Waters and Stanton have not produced software for this purpose as it would surely make the unit much more attractive to radio amateurs.

Update 1
After a very wet weekend it is now obvious that the rain guage isn't working. My unit has been an absolute nightmare. Meanwhile M0XDK hasn't had any more trouble with his at all. It seems that quality control is not high on Watson's (aka Waters and Stanton) list of priorities.

Update 2
I noticed that my station was showing a pretty consistant 10hPa down on other local stations visible on UIView. That may indicate an inaccuracy or just that I hadn't set an absolute/relative value for pressure in the setup. Whatever the reason setting a 10hPa difference instead of leaving both the same and selecting the higher one from the csv file now puts my station broadly in line with others around me.

Update 3
Checking the rain guage before returning it I found that the small magnet which pushes into the see-saw bucket was a tad too close to the reed switch housing and had obviously been catching. After pushing this in a little the guage is now at least registering some rain so I contacted W&S again through eBay messaging to say I wouldn't be returning that and enquired about my refund for the postal cost of returning the faulty display which I received a few days later.

Still on the rain guage - I'm not convinced that it is recording all rain. I have a couple of ideas on that and will maybe be making a couple of mods...
1) For reasons beyond me the reed switch is mounted on the far side of the circuit board from the magnet on the see-saw. Moving it looks easy.
2) I'm not convinced that all the water dripping through from the catchment tray above actually goes into the "correct" side of the see-saw. A short and narrow piece of plastic glued vertically up from the peak in the see-saw should ensure that none goes to the "wrong" side where it would drain away without being recorded.

Update 3
Moved the reed switch to the other side of the board and took the opportunity to shorten the cable to a more reasonable length. I didn't modify the see-saw as some experimentation convinced me that this is unnecessary. I'm pretty much satisfied that the rain guage is now working as well as it can.

I moved the unit to the front of the property to see if the wind speeds reported would become closer to what I think should be getting reported. They haven't so I guess the next project will be looking inside the wind guage to see how that works and if anything obvious is wrong with it.

To tidy up the appearance the wind sensors are now mounted on a pole rather than the rough sawn 2x1 I had zip tied the supplied mast to. I found that the mast fitted nicely inside a standard metal broom handle so they now sit proudly atop a grey broom handle fixed to a fence post hidden by the front hedge. Getting away with that one with the XYL is quite an achievement.

Update 4
2E0XDC kindly pointed me to Fine Offset Electronics who appear to be the manufacturers and there is a link to their software on that page. I am currently running this alternative software. It doesn't crash so often as the original provided by W&S but it has had one rather stange glitch whereby it was reporting huge rainfall when in fact there was none. M0XDK has also had this bug. Update 4.5 is that the rainfall bug has happened again and currently rainfall is excluded from my reports in case the emergency services send round a rescue helicopter or folks start building arks.