Voice Broadcast Weather Station

This school year, W1HLO worked on a couple of enhancements for our repeater.  One of the projects was a solar-powered weather station that could speak the current weather conditions over our repeater.  (Note: Our repeater is accessible on 441.950 MHz out +5 MHz offset with a PL of 67 Hz.)  Megan KC1NJR and Shaylin KC1NJS headed up this project and recently put it on the air.

The weather station uses an Argent Data Systems ADS-WS1 that has been configured to speak the weather conditions every 30 minutes and when the wind speed changes > 10mph.  The ADS-WS1, battery, radio, and charge controller are all mounted in a waterproof toolbox.  The ADS-WS1 is wired to a Baofeng UV-5R programmed to the repeater's frequency.  You can see a doodled wiring schematic below:

A 90 Watt solar panel connected to a charge controller and a 12V gel cell battery provided power to everything.  A 12V battery eliminator was used to easily convert the UV-5R to 12V usage.  (Note: The 12V plug and socket for the UV-5R battery eliminator should probably be removed and hard-wired together as the plug had to be taped to the socket to ensure a good connection.)  A doodled wiring schematic follows:

To program the ADS-WS1, we wired a programming cable as follows: