Now my weather watching is expanding to multiple sites! I was asked to recommend a reliable weather
station for a bird (and hoot owl) sanctuary near by. I had installed two stations for her there in
the past few years. First was a Dallas
(AAG) 1-wire station.
It was a wired station and I had the same one at my ranch.
But maintaining these little guys was an issue. The bearings would fail after a
few months.
Followed by a Lacrosse:
…which lasted a couple years. BTW this is the same rain sensor that the $99 station uses, it will be easy to convert that one to a spare for my WW2
Seeing Double
I've had good luck with my Wizard II so let's try the Davis... Vantage Vue
I got a couple one for the ranch, and one for the birds!
Hopefully everything will last a few years. There were only two issues setting these up.
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| The ISS#2 ...I like this new packaging no Styrofoam! |
First Problem…
It was a very minor issue but one of the Anemometers wind cups would not attach to the
station… I suspect the set screw was put in slightly askew and someone either
returned it without telling anyone. I would have simply suspected operator error but I just finished building the first one with no issue. I
called the support folks at Davis and they were most helpful and sent us a new
set! Very cool.
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| The vane and the wind cup |
Second Problem…
We got a call from the bird lady shortly after we
installed it for her. Saying there is no rain or wind and the console kept
saying: ”low Battery on Transmitter” I
had run both stations side by side at the ranch for over a week and never saw an issue, now they were acting differently 10 miles away from each other. ( I had one set for CH#1 and the other set for
CH#2) I dropped by to see if there really was a
battery issue, may be a charger issue as there was a rain event shortly after I
installed it. Nope, battery measured to be good. So I swapped her with mine and the problem
re-appeared! This time with my
good ISS. After a few minutes I
hit on the solution to the problem… I had her setup configured for to the default channel #1. After changing hers to CH#2 as well the
problem went away. There must be enough
local interference on that set of channels at that location that caused enough
data packets to drop out.
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| Console #1 in Operation |
Apparently
Davis does not send the ISS battery or charge state. This would be really good and we could track the sun rise and sets through the solar cells as well as the charge times, instead they count lost packets and declare the transmitter’s battery is bad…
Moral of This Story?
If we had only got one station we would have assumed the station was bad (…or the design was not working too well, and I would, of course, be thinking "what a @#!& piece of crap!) The whole thing may have gone back to Amazon had I only had a sample set of one. I don't really want to maintain two weather stations, only wanted to do installations thank you.
Other Than Those Issues...
One feature I got to test because I had two consoles on hand was to transmit the weather data from one console to another. It worked pretty well. I did not see a real use for me as the ISS reaches the whole house from a pole on my deck about 80ft away from the house! The diagnostic screens are very helpful, I found the second screen to be the most use as it shows the radio data.
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| I was never really a fan of this type of sensor ~ but it does install quickly |
In Summary
This seems like a pretty good system. It has it quarks but that seems to be part of the charm of Davis. ( like the "no leap year" bug in the Wizard II) We had a rare rain event of several inches and was able to compare my home made rain gauge davis-wizzard-iii-rain.html to this one. At first I thought that my WWII was way off. When I checked the Vue in the morning it read way less than my old unit's. It was not until I scrolled to "Storm" total they matched to one tip of the bucket. (only 0.01" difference: 1.82" to 1.83") This was a great verification of that older post.
The strange thing is the battery voltage is the voltage of the console battery, Which are a pretty hefty string of three "C" cells, I would like to see the charging and state of the thing that is up on a 20ft pole. The manual says it should last a couple years but I used the supplied power adapter as well.
The strange thing is the battery voltage is the voltage of the console battery, Which are a pretty hefty string of three "C" cells, I would like to see the charging and state of the thing that is up on a 20ft pole. The manual says it should last a couple years but I used the supplied power adapter as well.
Now I am thinking APRS... that expansion connector is right there...with all the data ready to jump out. Although I saw DK had a post in his blog that said Davis had changed the interface format to detect if a proper interface card thing is being used. I will need to investigate if it is the same on this version. http://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=17198.0 Yeah, that's part of the problem of sharing this kind of information, the owners of these products see more immediate revenue, and corporate types want every penny. Still, it think it a little short-sited of them not to let the public domain have a go at second sourcing accessories. They are set up perfectly to support us as they sell all the bits and parts as well.
~ ~ ~
Yes, Davis did put together a firmware update to detect the presence of a clone datalogger, but that has recently been reverse engineered as well.
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