About 8:30 this morning, the local NOAA weather radio station (WXJ40, 162.400 MHz, Pennacook, NH) went into a loop repeating the message that the station was offline. I checked my other local stations (WNG575 Pack Monadnock and KZZ41 Mount Washington) and they report the same. The only streaming station in New England is Dresden, Maine (WSM60) and that’s just broadcasting a 60Hz hum, so that’s likely a different, local problem. I checked the Outage Map at: [url]https://www.weather.gov/nwr/outages[/url] and didn’t see anything listed closer than the Albany, NY station down for maintenance. I emailed a report as instructed. Outage was over before 10 am.
New and Improved! (and downtime)
Today, the cable folks came by and upgraded all of our networking interface to new and faster devices. Unfortunately, it also meant I had to reconfigure all of the machines involved in the weather station, as they depend on static addresses to find each other. Laptops and cell phones and PCs that take whatever IP address they are given were up and running as soon as they were done (nearly three hours without internet! Can you imagine!) but the weather devices took a few hours: resetting DHCP reservations, a new router configuration to learn, digging up obscure instructions for some small devices, and tweak on settings. We were down, not posting updates to the website, from 1:40 pm to 7:55 pm, but we seem to be up and running now.
Downtime
Several of the weather reporting systems we have running broke down at 5:15 PM yesterday. While setting up fans in the windows after a long hot day, I suspect I bumped the GW1100 gateway device and cause it to malfunction. The gateway gets signals from all the local sensors, and makes that data available on the LAN. From there, a Raspberry Pi reads the data, formats it into several pretty formats, and forwards it on the website where you read it, and also forwards the data on to other online sites.
The gateway was in a quirky state neither on nor off, and the Raspberry Pi locked up waiting for it complete a conversation with gateway.
I didn’t notice the problem until this morning and after a lot of running around getting diagnostic info, turning things off and back on again (still the #1 solution to IT problems!) and jiggling a lot of wires, it appears we’re back up and running.
Hot enuf for ya?
A typical question to ask around Northern New England the the dog days of late August, but we had extraordinary heat in mid May. On the 20th of the month, a listing of the hottest places in the US (by official airport weather station readings) would typically include Phoenix or Palm Desert or someplace in Texas, but on this date, they were all along the East Coast, even listing Concord, NH as one of the hottest spots in the U.S. !
Dry February
AS SEEN ON TV!
Ryan Hall, digital meteorologist, did one of his well-attended livestreams during the Great Blizzard of 2026 and featured a picture I had submitted of his “Y’All-O-Meter 2.0″ showing 15 inches of snow in the field before the blizzard arrived in Contoocook. I was disappointed that we got wind and nearly no accumulation from the storm, while grateful we didn’t get the 33” reported around Providence, Rhode Island.
It really was “as seen on TV,” as I stream YouTube through the Roku to the TV. Okay, so not *broadcast* *television* but it was still cool to get a shoutout.
New temperature sensors
On the intranet weather report, we’ve added two new temperature/humidity sensors (WN31) to monitor the garage and the three-season porch. While the porch is enclosed for the cold season(s), temperatures are often the hottest in the house! The garage has become more important as LLL grew tomatoes this year, on a rolling cart and a totable bucket, and we would bring them in during inclement, especially extra-cold weather. On November 1, we’re still harvesting tomatoes, in New Hampshire!
Offline yesterday
Alert weather watchers observed the websites (https://wx.iayft.com, https://contoocook.org and https://contoocook.org/cell.php) were offline Sunday morning, July 27th. My internet hosting provider (Linode/Akamai) had a long-term site power outage and troubled recovery of their HVAC systems resulting in a long, slow, manual restoration. The were good about keeping their users informed. I expect many lessons were learned and I’m looking forward to the follow-up to the incident. No data was lost, and the sites are back up and running now. If anyone notices anomalies, let me know using the “Contact” form linked above.
How ’bout now?
Yesterday, June 23rd had a high temperature of 97.9°F, a record for the day, a heat index of 116.0°F and a dew point of 81.0°F! Today is expected to be similar. making an early New England heat wave, 3 days over 90°F.
Hot Enuf for ya?
97°F on the mercury and 115.5°F on the heat index