Met Office Meteorological Reseach Unit at Cardington, Bedforshire, operated Vaisala RS80 radiosondes from 1996-2002, measuring in-situ temperature, humidity, pressure and GPS location at 1Hz with the following parameters temperature, humidity, pressure, longitude, latitude, ascent rate.

The Vaisala RS80 device had ThermoCap, HumiCap, BaroCap sensors.

Vaisala radiosonde systems are used by meteorological organisations all around the world to measure weather in the Earth’s atmosphere, from the boundary layer to the upper atmosphere. The radiosonde is a lightweight, balloon-borne instrument that measures profiles of pressure, temperature and humidity from the ground to approximately 40 km. The radiosonde is equipped with a radio transmitter for sending the measurements securely to the observing station. The user has control over the sounding process by integrating sounding controls, archiving the sounding data and meteorological message creation. For routine soundings the system offers a variety of features and allows the desired balance of manual and automatic control. In addition to the traditional alphanumeric messages, the system software produces the WMO specified BUFR messages. This feature enables users to follow the WMO's recommendation to move from traditional alphanumeric codes to binary BUFR codes.