About KD5HIA

Who is KD5HIA?

Matthew Clark is a licensed amateur radio operator who obtained his callsign in May of 1999 in Lubbock, TX.

What does amateur radio have to do with weather?

Many weather enthusiasts who are also volunteer storm spotters (SKYWARN members) are also amateur radio operators, and one of the many benefits to having a license to operate is for communicating spotter location and conditions. Also, the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) identifies its members via their FCC-issued call-sign. Of course, a weather enthusiast need not have a amateur radio license to become a member of CWOP -- they'll just be assigned an arbitrary identifier instead (but they cannot operate amateur radio equipment).

I am not actively involved in storm spotting, so radio communications isn't directly involved in my weather observation hobby.

The weather station

The equipment in use is a Davis VantagePRO mounted on the roof of my house in San Angelo, TX. The software consists of Virtual Weather Station by Ambient Weather, a (rather large) MySQL database, and an IIS7/PHP5 web server. The data that is collected is archived and sent every few minutes to many external sources, including two big ones: the National Weather Service and Weather Underground. However, my data can be found in hundreds of places all over the Internet.