Weather Station Data Acquisition

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello Arduino World,

I am building a weather and climate monitoring station for a summer research project at my university (quest university canada: http://www.questu.ca). I am currently saving the data received from the sensors to an SD card. This is all done through the SD card shield. I just received an increase in funding for the project, and it is now feasible to have data transfer back to a server, where the data will be posted to a website for all to see.

I am looking for suggestions on the best way to transfer the data. Here is the relevant information surrounding the project:
The budget I have to allocate just to the transmission of data is 1500-3000 dollars (still to be finalized).
The station is approx. 25km away from where I will have the server.
There is cell service at the station.
I am measuring 7 parameters. 4 have 10 bits resolution, the other 3 are in the range 10-16 bits.
Currently no webcam, but this would be a cool (although unnecessary) addition

The ideas I am considering are:
Use 2G shield to send data via text to a raspberry pi, use pi as server
Use HAM radio, or some sort of radio transmission.

Any suggestions are welcomed. Thank you.
-Tyler

2

Check the xbee buying guide of Sparkfun, they got a model that covers 28 miles. Id prefer xbee rather than 2G.
Altough you have to consider the line of sight, are there buildings between your station and the server? Or is it just empty land. Because indoor/urban enviroment reduces considerably xbee range.

3

Thanks for the reply.

Xbee might be an option, but I believe I will not have line of sight between the server and transceiver.
I am currently perusing the buying guide and it seems very helpful. Thanks.

Any thoughts on GPRS vs 3G?

4

I don't know about the first one, but with 3G you should be able to directly upload data to the server if it is online, don't you?

5

$50 at the Arduino end should cover it. I guess, if you work really hard at it, you will find a way to spend the other $2950.

6

There is cell service at the station.
I am measuring 7 parameters. 4 have 10 bits resolution, the other 3 are in the range 10-16 bits.

so that is 14 bytes - adding a CRC32 checksum (must) and optional timestamp/RTC information makes it max 50 bytes

questions:
What is the frequency of measurements?
1000x per second or 1x per hour? (probably somewhere in between.)
Do all sensors use the same frequency of measurements?

7

Yes, with 3G you can directly upload but there is an monthly fee for an online server. It is my goal to avoid long term/ continuing costs with the project. Ideally everything would be payed for up front.

Every measurement is sent to the SD Card at 5 minute intervals. I was thinking I would send data out at appox. 30 minute intervals.

Looking further into the Xbee option. This module looks promising. XTend 900 1W RPSMA - 40 Mile Range - WRL-09411 - SparkFun Electronics