UltraSonic wind / weather station

[cg1shark]

On the last podcast Frank you mentioned starting to play with some ultra sonic wind meters. Have any things you have had some early success with? The drops are great however battery life when it is cold out is less than optimal. Would be kind of cool to have a weather station with ultrasonic wind detection with better battery life.

Anyone else played with any of that stuff and seen success?

 

[MarkCO]

On the last podcast Frank you mentioned starting to play with some ultra sonic wind meters. Have any things you have had some early success with? The drops are great however battery life when it is cold out is less than optimal. Would be kind of cool to have a weather station with ultrasonic wind detection with better battery life.

Anyone else played with any of that stuff and seen success?

I have "played" with both Optical and Ultrasonic when I was working on autonomous vehicle projects. The US was used while the vehicle was in motion to give us the actual wind at the vehicle after subtracting out the ground speed. It worked great, and depending on how we collected and tabulated the data, we could do some pretty cool stuff with it. The optical was then used for wind at range and elevation as compared to the wind at the vehicle. The operator got pretty good at getting a wind map from the vehicle out to as much as a mile in 50m increments. If the air was "too clean" he could shoot a small dust flare to provide a target cloud for the optical, but that was rare. It was not an offensive vehicle, so we were not shooting things, but the data we got back was significantly better than anything I have seen in the commercial market, the US unit was about $5k, and the only thing we knew about the optical unit was that it was really expensive.

Not knowing what Frank is using, I can see a place where Kestrel might come up with a station that had US wind, elevation, azimuth, and temperature and keep a Kestrel display unit updated via bluetooth. If they then made a handheld unit just have AB and a display, that would be a pretty hot set-up. They could easily do that for under $1K depending on size.

 

[blcouch]

I’m not any kind of expert but the idea of using lasers or ultrasound to detect moving particles in the air to determine velocity has been in my head for a few years. The issue of there not being anything downrange to pick up always seemed to be a stopblock though. The thought once occurred to me that one could use a subsonic suppressed single shot weapon like a .22 or maybe something heavier to kick up dust at a mid range to give you something to detect, provided the operational area/parameters allowed for such a thing without risk to the shooter. There could be something developed for max ordinate like a miniature chaff round, of type and appearance to escape detection from down range, that could be sent up, sighted through your sensor package and a high level wind range given. I think the Israelis were working on downrange laser detection of wind carried material for wind speed detection but I don’t know what became of it, unless it’s what’s being referenced above?

 

[Lowlight]

The unit came in while i was teaching the class,

I will set it up and report back