The equipment for this site was originally bought from R & D Electronics of Broadstairs, Kent, England during 1996. Subsequently, manufacture of this type of equipment was taken over by Instromet Ltd of North Walsham, Norfolk. It appears from the catalogues that the equipment sold today is basically very similar in terms of hardware to the original. The station has worked pretty reliably over the 10 years since it was bought. There have been many changes to the actual station layout before the condition which exists today was arrived at. For example, the rain gauge had to be moved from a position on the roof to a more acceptable position close to the ground. Also the anemometer and sunshine recorder were moved from the roof of our house to the current position on an ex British Telecom pole approximately 10 metres above the ground in the Glebe (a large field next to our garden belonging to the Church of Scotland) at a point roughly 250 metres from the house. This required the laying of a 350 metre long 10 way cable to connect to the station.
As a result of moving the anemometer and sunshine recorder, wind and sun readings are no longer significantly affected by the large trees in our garden, and the exposure is quite good. Auchterhouse Hill (alt. 426m) is about 1km distant to the NNE, this affects the early morning sun records during the summer months but that is a characteristic of the site. It was surprising that electrically, the equipment did not seem to be significantly altered by the length of the cable,although there was a problem due to voltage drop affecting the wind direction readings slightly. The original Stevenson screen unfortunately blew over recently and was beyond repair, so I constructed a new one using a recipe similar to Stevenson screen, a very useful web article. Operation of the station was revolutionised when I installed recently Brian Hamilton's excellent WD software, and more recently WDLive from Julian Best and his team.
The position of the site is 3 degrees 04 minutes W, 56 degrees 31.9 minutes N (grid ref NO34303825) altitude 187m above MSL.