Early yesterday morning, around 01:37, my computer started getting really slow, and uploaded weather information only once more, at 02:03.
Sometimes after Windows download an update, as it typically does on Tuesdays, it starts to behave badly, slowing down to the point where every keystroke or mouse click is tedious. I concluded that was the case yesterday morning, and rebooted.
The reboot was slow and tedious, and after Windows came back to life it started telling my weather monitoring software that COM1 (the port it uses to communicate with the weather station base) was already in use.
Typically, a reboot or two has fixed that problem, but it didn't this time around. After tinkering with it for quite a while, I gave up with the problem unresolved.
Today, I tried to install a USB-to-RS232 adapter I bought at a second-hand store. It didn't have a driver, so I had to do some searching. The first driver I tried didn't work, but the second did -- and required another reboot.
After the reboot, the USB gadget was alive as COM6. Annoyingly, my weather monitoring software doesn't know there can be such a thing as a COM6, so it wouldn't talk to the computer through the USB gadget either.
However, the monitoring software produced an interesting error, saying that COM1 wasn't reporting any data from the station base. That's a change from what it had been saying, that COM1 was busy.
I unplugged the RS232 cable from the USB gadget and plugged it into the COM1 port on the back of my computer. It generated an error message about a badly-formed data string from the station base and crashed, but I concluded that the COM1 port was working again.
After restarting my monitoring software, everything seemed back to normal. None of what I had done explained why COM1 stopped working, nor why it started working again before 22:25 tonight. But it is working again, so I'm happy.
I lost almost two days of weather data, but based on the nearest other station (and looking out the windows), I didn't lose any precipitation data, which I consider more significant than other data since it's cumulative.
- - -
I had one other apparent problem with my reporting. All day on the 24th, it was raining. At 19:24, my station reported a big spike in the rain and high winds. I don't recall seeing a sudden downpour, but after the winds settled down again I discovered that the rain gauge had fallen off the support where I've kept it. Thus it's likely that at least a little of that rain data are shaky around that time.
