I can understand the urge to be as accurate as possible. I have gotten my kitchen floor soaked more than one weekend in my life trying to do the minute dribble rate vs the calibrated tip volume and even an old IV from a hospitalization with the tube adjuster for a tiny amount slow enough to take into account the slop with each tip.
In the long run most of the runs lead me to believe that things were pretty close to start.
A friend had the similar urge. One summer he had something like six raingauges all within a 10' circle in the clear. The ranged from a rectangular throat cheapie, to a very expensive tipping bucket to a glass vial like the old implement companies gave to their customers at Christmas and new years to an ancient brass Taylor with a knife edge collecting throat. After many rains some gentle to a few real frog stranglers, the results the gauges gave were surprisingly similar, with one exception. During one particularly heavy storm, the Taylor had almost 3/4" more in it than the others indicated, despite him being very sure it had been dumped correctly, and no bird had 'added' to it nor the sprinkler on the garden, etc.
I have two new-to-me high end gauges 'salvaged' from eBay so they would have a good home and be cleaned and serviced with love and care that I undoubtedly will set up and run a few test volumes through to see just how close they are to accurate. That obsessive behavior is part of trying to do the best we can, especially at our hobby. And then if there are differences between the amounts reported, I'll blame it on microclimate variations from one collector to the next.
PS I was just reminded about the effort to try to be the best one can and the effect it had on some part of our history. I got the story from the daughter of the engineer involved, and since she isn't prone to magnifying the stories she tells, I have a feeling there may be some kernel of truth to it. Her father worked in Houston for NASA during the space program. His contribution to the project was summed up by replacing a potentiometer with a couple of high grade resistors. It turned out that as the circuit board for whatever function it was, passed through numerous calibrations and attempts at being dead on for a received downlink telemetry during manned launches (after all astronauts' lives and health were at stake) the thing got adjusted so much back and forth to find the center zone, that things got loose and it jumped about much more than expected. He traced to over-adjustment and either a much more expensive part would need to be substituted that could withstand all that racking back and forth, or a fixed value was substituted once the optimal value was determined and was never adjusted again. I guess it worked ok, and saved a lot of money and nervous technicians overcalibrating the receivers.
In the long run most of the runs lead me to believe that things were pretty close to start.
A friend had the similar urge. One summer he had something like six raingauges all within a 10' circle in the clear. The ranged from a rectangular throat cheapie, to a very expensive tipping bucket to a glass vial like the old implement companies gave to their customers at Christmas and new years to an ancient brass Taylor with a knife edge collecting throat. After many rains some gentle to a few real frog stranglers, the results the gauges gave were surprisingly similar, with one exception. During one particularly heavy storm, the Taylor had almost 3/4" more in it than the others indicated, despite him being very sure it had been dumped correctly, and no bird had 'added' to it nor the sprinkler on the garden, etc.
I have two new-to-me high end gauges 'salvaged' from eBay so they would have a good home and be cleaned and serviced with love and care that I undoubtedly will set up and run a few test volumes through to see just how close they are to accurate. That obsessive behavior is part of trying to do the best we can, especially at our hobby. And then if there are differences between the amounts reported, I'll blame it on microclimate variations from one collector to the next.
PS I was just reminded about the effort to try to be the best one can and the effect it had on some part of our history. I got the story from the daughter of the engineer involved, and since she isn't prone to magnifying the stories she tells, I have a feeling there may be some kernel of truth to it. Her father worked in Houston for NASA during the space program. His contribution to the project was summed up by replacing a potentiometer with a couple of high grade resistors. It turned out that as the circuit board for whatever function it was, passed through numerous calibrations and attempts at being dead on for a received downlink telemetry during manned launches (after all astronauts' lives and health were at stake) the thing got adjusted so much back and forth to find the center zone, that things got loose and it jumped about much more than expected. He traced to over-adjustment and either a much more expensive part would need to be substituted that could withstand all that racking back and forth, or a fixed value was substituted once the optimal value was determined and was never adjusted again. I guess it worked ok, and saved a lot of money and nervous technicians overcalibrating the receivers.