Preferences panel
Click on the toolkit icon or press F6 to bring up the Preferences panel. There may be a short pause while the COM port is closed. This is normal.
There are five tabs relating to the different areas of the software.
Image selection
Here is where the images can be selected to link to the five resource buttons.
If you select a Local image, press the 'Browse' button to choose an image from your hard disc or network.
For other resources, the 'Browse' button is disabled.
Currently, the Internet based resources include 'UK Weather', 'Infra-red Satellite' and 'Visible Satellite'.
General settings
This tab is divided into three parts.
Station settings
Your Location: For now, this will always be 'United Kingdom'. Watch this space for European updates.
Archive Interval: Select the time interval at which you would like to keep weather data.
Station ID Code: This is reserved for future use. It won't do any harm if you type a value in now.
Elevation: Set your weather station height above sea level. This is used for calculating the local barometric pressure.
Latitude/Longitude: Reserved for future use. You can fill them in if you prefer.
Time settings
Day Start/Night Start: These are purely personal preferences; used to select day (sun) or night (moon) icons for current weather.
Remote station logging
Select the station whose data you would like to log alongside your own.
Hint: Larger airports produce more data!
Alarm settings
You can set alarm values for each weather variable.
Any readings that become larger than the set maximum, or smaller than the set minimum, will appear in red on the main display.
Choose a weather variable from the drop down list.
There are predefined values for each - change these values as you see fit and press 'save' after each change.
The units for each value are those chosen in the next tab.
You can choose whether or not to be alerted audibly as well by ticking the 'use sound?' box. The system will beep the first time the alarm is triggered and from then on.
Unit and weather station settings
Units
Choose your preferred units of measurement from each drop down list. These units will be shown over the entire program. The choice of whether to use sea level pressure or not will be reflected in the reports and local data screens. Raw data and graphs give both sea level and absolute pressure.
Weather station
If you do not have an electronic weather station, tick the 'Manual Input Only' box to disable the 'weather station' screen as no readings will be shown there.
Otherwise, choose the model of your weather station from the drop down lists. If you are using an Oregon or Lacrosse weather station, choose your COM port from those available on your machine.
If you are using a Vantage Pro, things work a little differently. You need to use your Weatherlink installation to generate a text file which contains your weather data. This is then read by Skymet. Choose the resultant file here with the 'browse' button.
Internet settings
Use this screen to choose whether or not to download Internet resources each time the program starts and/or every hour the program is running. If you do not have an Internet connection you should un-tick these boxes.
You can also set proxy server details in here if you need them. If you do not need them or you don't know what these are, leave it blank.
Misc settings
Graph Options - 'Interval before NULL is assumed'. The graphs will not draw data if there is too large an interval between readings, in order to keep the graphs meaningful. The default value of 61 minutes assumes you are storing data points at least once an hour. If you store data less frequently, say once a day, then you will want to increase this value so you can plot a graph. We suggest a value of 1600 for daily readings.
Manual Entry Options - 'Use Default Time'. Again this is is of interest to those taking readings once a day - if you put a default time in here, you won't have to select it when entering the reading each day. The time set here can be overridden when entering data.
