My suspicion is that this happens because of unusual propagation conditions such as "tropospheric ducting," which may be associated with unusual weather or sunspot activity, among other factors. There are occasions when distant radio or TV signals can be received briefly, sometimes stronger than local stations. The same conditions might affect the frequencies used by weather sensors.
I have a rooftop 5in1 for wind and rain measurements and a temperature/humidity sensor in the back yard, both connected through an Acurite bridge. Sometimes Weewx stops receiving data from one sensor, while the other continues to work for a time. Then the other sensor will go silent, as well, and shortly afterward the first sensor will reappear. Eventually, the second sensor also reconnects. The time difference suggests to me that the outages are caused by something in motion, which could be an atmospheric condition. I can't rule out the possibility that there's some sort of local source of interference, though. I'm sure there are people reading this forum who know more about RF than I do, so it would be great to hear their opinions about this. On Thursday, October 29, 2020 at 8:03:02 AM UTC-4 Peter Whisker wrote: > I find the same occurs on my FineOffset HP1000 clone - it happens to the > device receiver. > > My (unproven) theory is that the signals from the external and internal > sensors which come every 16 seconds drift with respect with each other > until they end up being transmitted at exactly the same time and the > receiver can not discriminate them. After half a day or so the situation > recovers and is fine for a month or more. > > Peter > > On Thursday, October 29, 2020 at 4:12:29 AM UTC seano...@gmail.com wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> My station has been running weewx + rt_sdr for a year and all is working >> well. Weewx receives the station data and broadcasts it to windguru. >> However, there is an occasional problem that happens and i can't figure out >> what the cause is. All of a sudden, rtl_433 stops receiving from the sensor >> for hours at a time. >> >> During those periods, when i run: >> *sudo tail -f /var/log/weewx.log* >> >> All i see is: >> *user.sdr: lines=[]* >> >> If you leave it, it eventually comes back online itself. I can confirm >> that during that time there was no loss of power or internet - because i >> can still connect to the pi and manage it. Also, weather station has new >> batteries, so that is not the problem. I have a feeling that the problem is >> happening with the realtek SDR dongle. Because a power reset sometimes >> fixes the problem - and a physical removal of the USB dongle into a >> different USB port seems to fix the problem immedaitely. >> >> I've even tried a python script to eject the USB device which also seems >> to help. But in order to do this i first need to disable rtl_433 in the >> weewx.conf, then reboot, then run rtl_433 on its own until it sees the >> sensor, then re-enable rtl_433 in weewx.conf and reboot. That is usually >> the process to fix it immediately, so it definitely feels to me like a >> software issue. >> >> Any ideas? >> >> Thanks, >> Sean >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "weewx-user" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to weewx-user+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/weewx-user/effc762a-6c74-4c27-8a9b-af0fd71d0917n%40googlegroups.com.
