[aprssig] APRS Air Quality Monitoring

[Steve Dimse]

> On Nov 11, 2018, at 8:19 PM, Scott Miller <scott at opentrac.org> wrote:
> 
> Let me know if you find anything suitable for a higher range.  Like much, much higher.  I've been talking about building nephelometers for Burning Man for a few years to help visualize how much dust is kicked up by activity (mostly vehicles) out there.  The challenge is making something that won't get the optics fouled in an hour - it'd probably have to have a continuous flow of clean air past the optics.  It's not unusual for visibility to get down to less than 20', and at night (backscatter from lights makes it worse) I've seen it down to about 3'.
> 
> At that price, I'll have to give one of those sensors a try for use at home.  Apparently fire season is year-round in California now and it's always orange outside.

Might be something cool to add to the Tracker 4, though since the output is TTL you would need an rs-232 converter unless you have some trick up your sleeve...

For Burning Man you probably need something more like a fog sensor, ought to be possible to build yourself. Searching the web it looks like these use scatter rather than transmission as well, probably to keep the distance between the sensors short, I suspect measuring a loss of transmission would take a greater distance.

http://www.opticalsensors.se/ofs.html

Steve