Equipment Supplier: C.W. Price & Co. Case Study

Weather monitoring for airport operations

CW Price & Co., South Africa

A handful of companies have been customers of Columbia Weather Systems since the beginning. We’d like to highlight one of those with this recent communication from Kelvin Price of C.W. Price & Company in South Africa.

A 40+ Year Generational Relationship

Wow -- what a milestone for Columbia Weather Systems of 25 years, but we go beyond that when CWS was still under the Hinds brand name. If memory serves me right, C.W. Price & Company first started working with Hinds somewhere in the mid to late 1980s.

Similar to CWS we are now a 3rd generation company started by my grandfather in 1949.

C.W. Price initially supplied many Capricorn II units mainly into forestry, small airports, and the general industry. (C.W. Price was also one of the first dealers to be able to repair Capricorn weather stations.)

We recently managed our first installation of a Columbia MicroServer system at an International Airport. Kruger Mpumalanga International airport is the gateway airport to the world-famous Kruger National Park. We also have a similar system at a few local regional airports.

What we are most proud of is our 3rd generation installation of weather stations and now using CWS Microserver systems at all of our South African Airforce bases.

Capricorn FLX modular weather station solves lightning surge problems and meets standards 

After many years of working with the South African Airforce it was decided to upgrade some of their outdated equipment and to free up real estate space in their control tower panels.

Existing equipment was hard wired from Weather Station site over several kilometres to Airport Tower.

The big problem here was induced surges due to lightning that was severely damaging equipment.

We then introduced the Airforce to Columbia FLX Modular Weather Station with ethernet wifi bridge wireless technology which solved some of the lightning surge problems, this was successfully adopted as their national standard.

FLX system was specifically chosen as it can meet airport standards, i.e., wind speed and direction to be measured at 10 meter above ground level with temperature/humidity at 1.25 meters.

Certain Airports also require dual pressure sensors such as the Vaisala PTB330 which CWS was able to incorporate into their WeatherMaster Software and Weather Display.

WeatherMaster Software for Control Tower Display and Data Logging for Accident Investigation

CW Price & Co along with assistance from CWS is busy attempting to develop CWS Microserver that will enable transmission of data to our local Weather service who will in turn generate an aviation METAR. This then gets published onto International sites for further distribution worldwide.

In addition, we then also display this METAR information on the WeatherMaster display PC in airport tower for air traffic controller.

An important aspect of any airport system is the ability to record and view all data so that data may be analyzed in event of any accident at or nearby the airport.

CWS and staff have always been available and most accommodating to whatever queries that we may have from heavy technical to firmware updates either online or offline.

Congratulations to CWS and team, hoping that there are many more years to come.

—Kelvin Price

FAQ

Q: What weather station did CW Price install at the airports?

A: The Capricorn FLX modular weather station was chosen to meet airport standards for separate wind and temperature measurement locations, as well as dual barometric pressure sensors, and monitoring. 

“What we are most proud of is our 3rd generation installation of weather stations ... at all of our South African Airforce bases.”

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Links for additional information:

Capricorn FLX Weather Station Info

Weather MicroServer Page

CW Price Website