I built BigCountryWx.net as a project to share the weather information generated by my personal weather station I have here at my home in rural Jones County. We use the weather equipment to keep track of what's going on "up in the sky" and to see how HOT or COLD it is outside before we venture out. As I found more and more web sites others had created to display their weather station data across the country I decided it would be fun to do the same. I also enjoy the challenge of having the web site display the data in a "live" format and the process of getting that data from my home out here in the country onto the web for the world to see!

Weather Data is collected by an Oregon Scientific WMR100 Professional Wireless Weather Station and a Davis Weather monitor II system I rescued from a dumpster and repaired. The data is collected and uploaded to the web site every 2 minuets by a Pc running Ambient Weather's Virtual Weather Station internet edition and Thunderhead Technologies' WxSolution Software. A second PC runs the lightning Detection system which consists of a Boltek Lightning Detector Card and and external direction sensing antenna mounted about 50 feet from the house. This system uses Astrogenic's Nextstorm software to collect and plot lightning strikes in real time. Our lightning data is also fed in realtime to the StrikeStar lightning network at www.StrikeStarus.com.

the Radar image I use is created on this web server by a script I created that gets the overlay data from various National Weather Service Radar sites and pastes them into their correct positions on a background map every 5 minuets. (just a note.. if you look at the radar background image you'll see a small blue dot... that's' approx here my house is.) Currently Monitored Radars are (Moran, Midland, San Angelo and Lubbock)

The Satellite images are also collected and the Hawley Position Marker is overlaid on them by a small server run script I wrote. It uses the same basic routines as the radar building script. These images update approx every 15 minuets.

The SkyCam is a StarDot Netcam mounted atop a 45 foot extendable tower that at one time held our Heartland Cable antenna. The camera is a Linux based stand alone ip camera and it FTP's an image to the webserver every 15 seconds. The camera is mounted on a RadioShack Antenna Rotor that I can move from inside the house. (To this day I've never been able to get the camera level because the guide wires run through allot of trees and they pull on it unevenly. One day I'll move the thing to a better location! =)

The project really started to take shape when I discovered the BOLTEK Lightning Detection system and some of the really great software available to process and feed that information online. I'm a computer network Tech by trade and doing this kind of stuff is what I enjoy most!

I hope you find my web site useful and entertaining and can forgive the lack of polish.

It is very much a work in progress and you'll find that things will change occasionally as I learn more tricks and interesting things to do with the data!

If you have any questions please feel free to ask me and I'll try to answer the best I can!

Email me by clicking here Kevin Palivec