Author Topic: ISS Transmitting Board  (Read 35176 times)

Blicj11

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ISS Transmitting Board
« on: September 11, 2015, 09:33:33 PM »
It has taken me 15 months to determine that I have a problem with some part of my Davis Vantage Pro2 Plus ISS kit. My unit is about 15 months old and I was a little slow figuring out what is happening. About 5 months after I installed the ISS, the transmitter battery failed. I replaced it and didn't think much about it. 5 months later the sceond battery failed. When I investigated in the ISS, I couldn't really tell if I had securely connected the lead from the circuit board, which would have explained the quick  battery life. I put in another battery when I should have contacted Davis as I was still under warranty at the time.

However, the ravages of time on my brain combined for a weak link in the reasoning department and I went on just as if I had good sense.

Today the battery failed again, and now my deductive powers have fired back up like they should have 5 months ago.

Since there is no foggy/cloudy residue over the solar panel, I assume it is fine. I either have a bad super capacitor or something else is bad on the transmitter circuit board. I called Davis tech support and they say it "can only be the board and the board needs to be replaced."

I called Ryan at Scaled Instruments and he says it could be either. The $5 fix is to replace the super cap and the more expensive fix is to replace the transmitter board. Right now Ryan happens to be selling the boards for about $US57, which is the cheapest price you can find them anywhere, about $100 less than retail and $30 less than I was able to get out of Davis tech support.

I couldn't decide which way to go; he told me he was selling the boards at a pretty good clip given the price. Ryan did not pressure me one way or the other but I decided to buy both a super cap and a board. That way I have a spare transmitter board at a good price if the super cap is not the problem.

I'll report back next week, but just want to share than I felt like I got more insight from Ryan at Scaled Instruments than I did from tech support at Davis, and if you are in the market for a replacement wireless transmitter board, he has a killer price right now.
Blick


elagache

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Ryan's da' man! (Re: ISS Transmitting Board)
« Reply #1 on: September 12, 2015, 12:47:15 AM »
Dear Blick and WeatherCat station caregivers,

Sorry, that you had your station fail so soon after you installed it.  That is a bummer.

I'll be interested to learn how your attempt to replace the supercapacitor turns out.  I was too chicken to try that, I just haven't done much in the way of soldering on circuit boards.

Swapping out the ISS circuit board is reasonably easy and I bought one from Ryan and Scaled Instruments when I was struggling with my sensor errors problem.  You'll need instructions that Ryan can give you or I might have them still in my packrat collection of emails related to the problem with my station.

Best of luck in getting things up and running again once more!

Cheers, Edouard

Blicj11

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Re: ISS Transmitting Board
« Reply #2 on: September 12, 2015, 05:33:35 PM »
Yesterday I got an alert from WC that the ISS battery failed. Two hours later I got a message that the following sensors failed: Ext temp, wind, ext humidity. I assumed the sensor failure was just the failed battery. At 1:00 this morning I got an alert that all transmitter batteries are now good, but I still don't have any readings from the three failed sensors. I'm still away from home and have not yet changed the battery. Is there anything I should do to "reboot" hte ISS or console once I get the battery changed tonight?
Blick


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Just replace the battery (Re: ISS Transmitting Board)
« Reply #3 on: September 12, 2015, 05:48:34 PM »
Hi Blick and WeatherCat fans,

Sorry you are having these problems.

Yesterday I got an alert from WC that the ISS battery failed. Two hours later I got a message that the following sensors failed: Ext temp, wind, ext humidity. I assumed the sensor failure was just the failed battery. At 1:00 this morning I got an alert that all transmitter batteries are now good, but I still don't have any readings from the three failed sensors. I'm still away from home and have not yet changed the battery. Is there anything I should do to "reboot" hte ISS or console once I get the battery changed tonight?

As far as I know there is no "boot button" on the ISS board.  Just put in a new battery and hope that buys you some time.  This does sound very similar to the problems I was having last autumn.  Bummer dude.

Edouard

Blicj11

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Re: ISS Transmitting Board
« Reply #4 on: September 12, 2015, 10:35:42 PM »
Thanks Edouard. A miracle has happened. Our son happened by and when I found out he was there, I asked him to change the ISS battery. (The miracle is that he came by.) He put the console in setup mode, changed the battery, and everything is back in happy mode. We we flying home tonight from Texas and sometime in the next couple of weekends I will either replace the super cap or the circuit board, or both. Stay tuned.
Blick


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Good luck with da' procedure . . . (Re: ISS Transmitting Board)
« Reply #5 on: September 13, 2015, 11:54:42 PM »
Dear Blick and WeatherCat station caregivers, . . .

Anyone who thinks that taking care of personal weather station is easy . . . .

Thanks Edouard. A miracle has happened. Our son happened by and when I found out he was there, I asked him to change the ISS battery. (The miracle is that he came by.) He put the console in setup mode, changed the battery, and everything is back in happy mode.

Glad your station is back up and running with as minimum downtime as possible.

We we flying home tonight from Texas and sometime in the next couple of weekends I will either replace the super cap or the circuit board, or both. Stay tuned.

I'll be interested to hear how things turn out.  I'm very suspicious about the super-capacitor hypothesis.  There was one other guy on the WX-Forum who was complaining about ISS boards that were not switching correctly between the solar-panel, super-capacitor, and battery.  I wonder if Davis has some bad boards out there we are two unlucky recipients of them.  At least you have a plan-B if that turns out to be the case.

Cheers, Edouard

Blicj11

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Re: ISS Transmitting Board
« Reply #6 on: September 15, 2015, 04:05:08 AM »
Edouard, please remind me of how you determined that you battery was being drained and the super cap was not doing its job.
Blick


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Trial and error (Re: ISS Transmitting Board)
« Reply #7 on: September 15, 2015, 11:10:13 PM »
Dear Blick and WeatherCat station troubleshooters,

Edouard, please remind me of how you determined that you battery was being drained and the super cap was not doing its job.

I don't remember how I decided that was the problem.  However, the whole thing started shortly after I had done my annual replacement of the 123 battery.  The symptoms were sensor errors.  As part of my troubleshooting, I double-checked the voltage of the new battery I had installed and found it low.  At first I thought it was a bad battery, but the problems continued.  For whatever reason, I started to notice that the battery was discharging very rapidly.  If I replaced the battery frequently, I could keep the station online.

I'm still not sure what was going on, but my board was definitely failing in some way that using a lot of current.  I was killing a battery every couple days.  Keep an eye of the voltage under load if that isn't a royal pain to do.  It should drop only very slowly if nothing is wrong.

Hope this helps, . . . . Edouard

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Re: ISS Transmitting Board
« Reply #8 on: October 29, 2015, 05:20:23 AM »
Here is the latest report on this issue. I decided to address this problem of the Super Cap apparently not doing anything by replacing the ISS transmitter board. I could have replaced the Super Cap but I just didn't feel like figuring out how to solder standing at the top of a ladder. Like others on the forum, I bought a replacement board from Ryan at Scaled Instruments for about half what Davis charges. Swapping that out was supposed to be fairly straight forward. And it was, except for the discovery that when I moved the anemometer last summer, I used weather-rated Cat 6 cable. I spliced that cable back into the Davis telephone wire inside the ISS plastic box and it was the dickens to pay to manoeuvre those 4 weather-proof splices back through the cutout in the box. But eventually we (my son and I) were able to coax the splices out, one at a time.

After we got the new module hooked back up (it was much easier to thread the splices back into the new box than it was to take them out of the old one), we took the console out of setup mode and discovered that although we were transmitting, there was no external data on the console. We double checked everything, including making sure all the cables were tight, in the right ports and installed a new battery. Still no data.

I called Davis. They told me everyone in the world (except Edouard) used the factory default of Station ID 1. They had me change the DIP switches to use Station ID 5, then change the console to ID 5 and this time, we had data! They told me that changing the Station ID was a frequently-used trick to get the ISS to restart transmitting properly after swapping out the transmitter board.

So my big adventure turned out fine. Now I will wait 5 months and see if my battery dies again. If it does, then I will have to swap out the solar panel.

Whilst I had the thing apart, I cleaned out the collector cup, applied Rain-X to it and blew the spider webs out of the tipping buckets, etc. We are supposed to get an inch of snow tomorrow so I figured that my annual maintenance should not be procrastinated any longer.
Blick


Blicj11

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Re: ISS Transmitting Board
« Reply #9 on: October 29, 2015, 02:29:16 PM »
Ryan, from Scaled Instruments, offered this additional insight:

When you decommissioned the old transmitter on channel 1 and commissioned the new transmitter on channel 1 they conflicted with each other.  Your console was picking up the old transmitter and showing "low battery" and no data on the sensors... because the battery was out and nothing connected to it.  You probably had the old transmitter closer to the console than the installed transmitter and the console "saw" it instead of the intended transmitter.  The old transmitter will die as soon as the supercap runs out of juice.
Blick


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Glad you are back in business. (Re: ISS Transmitting Board)
« Reply #10 on: October 29, 2015, 10:23:28 PM »
Dear Blick and WeatherCat station caregivers,

Glad you are back in business!  [tup]  Station maintenance can be a real pain.  Ryan was probably correct, your problem was that the old transmitter board was still sending some sort of a signal.  To make it die faster, you can turn on the LED that flashes when data is transmitted.

Cheers, Edouard

Galmpton_Miller

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Re: ISS Transmitting Board
« Reply #11 on: November 01, 2015, 03:14:43 PM »
Interesting.
You could wrap the old ISS in aluminium foil to stop the RF signal "escaping" and being picked up by the console. Maybe use 2 or 3 separate wrappings and try and ensure that any gaps or joints don't line up and allow the RF out.
HTH

Stuart

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Shielding vs. ID change. (Re: ISS Transmitting Board)
« Reply #12 on: November 01, 2015, 11:16:44 PM »
Dear Stuart and WeatherCat station caregivers,

You could wrap the old ISS in aluminium foil to stop the RF signal "escaping" and being picked up by the console. Maybe use 2 or 3 separate wrappings and try and ensure that any gaps or joints don't line up and allow the RF out.

Yes that might work.  However, if you have transmitter board already out of your station, is it extremely easy to change the transmitter ID of the board you are abandoning to any thing other than the ID you are actually using.  If you turn on the LED display, the board will run out of power very rapidly.  I've tested it and it can be as little as an hour.  So that is the easiest solution.

If you have a Davis station in a suburban or urban area, it is probably a good idea to change the ID to something other than 1 anyway.  Putting up a weather station is popular and you never know what someone next to you might put up a Davis station that you cannot see or do not notice.  The odds of someone else picking the same ID of the remaining 7 is really low.  It is a small amount of insurance that your station won't have any transmission "issuez" no matter what your neighbors are up to.

Cheers, Edouard

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Re: ISS Transmitting Board
« Reply #13 on: November 02, 2015, 06:13:49 AM »
You could wrap the old ISS in aluminium foil to stop the RF signal "escaping" and being picked up by the console. Maybe use 2 or 3 separate wrappings and try and ensure that any gaps or joints don't line up and allow the RF out.

I'm waiting for Herb to recommend wrapping my head in aluminum foil to keep out the voices.

However, if you have transmitter board already out of your station, is it extremely easy to change the transmitter ID of the board you are abandoning to any thing other than the ID you are actually using.  If you turn on the LED display, the board will run out of power very rapidly.  I've tested it and it can be as little as an hour.  So that is the easiest solution.

Agreed. Turning on Switch 4 turns on the LED and the battery runs down in no time.

If you have a Davis station in a suburban or urban area, it is probably a good idea to change the ID to something other than 1 anyway.

Davis recommends you don't leave the ID switched to 1.
Blick


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ID change not always necessary. (Re: ISS Transmitting Board)
« Reply #14 on: November 02, 2015, 09:25:49 PM »
Dear Blick and WeatherCat station caregivers,

If you have a Davis station in a suburban or urban area, it is probably a good idea to change the ID to something other than 1 anyway.

Davis recommends you don't leave the ID switched to 1.

I'm not sure everyone needs to do this.  I had my station at ID #1 for 4 years and never had any problems.  It appears to me that having a personal weather station is rapidly gaining in popularity.  It is popular enough that in my neighborhood it has started to become a problem.  However, I think most station owners can get a good idea of how likely it is that another Davis station could interfere with your own.  If your nearest neighbor is too far away or you can see clearly that none of your neighbors have a David station, as the old saying goes: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Cheers, Edouard