Recommendations for weather station (I have Davis Vantage Vue at present)

[martinu]

I'm looking for people's recommendations for a weather station with separate wind and rain/temperature/humidity sensors, at an affordable price.

I currently have a Davis Vantage Vue weather station which is now suffering (again!) from the dreaded "stuck humidity sensor" fault. I had it repaired under warranty a couple of years ago but it's just failed again now, out of warranty. The outside humidity reading spends a lot of its time at 1%, only occasionally rising to a peak of about 40% for a few hours.

I'm also finding it restrictive that the wind sensors are in the same unit as the temperature sensors, which makes it difficult to site the sensor unit somewhere high up (to get unobstructed wind measurements) which is not close to a roof that may radiate heat and so affect the temperature/humidity readings. The only high-up places in my garden, to avoid trees, are on the gable ends of the house - I'd need a very tall free-standing pole to avoid the trees.

So I'm looking to upgrade to a weather station which has separate wind/temperature sensor units which can be located in different places. And hopefully one which is not too costly to maintain if it, too, ever suffers from humidity sensor failure. I gather one of the reasons that the Davis Vantage Vue is so expensive to repair is that the temperature/humidity sensor is part of the motherboard and is not a separate replaceable plug-in module (brilliant bit of design, Davis!).

I could go for a Davis Vantage Pro, but do people have any other recommendations for weather stations with similar functionality to the Davis Vantage Vue but with separate wind and temperature sensor units? UV/sunlight sensor might be nice, over and above what the Vue has, but it's not essential. I can manage without esoteric things like soil temperature sensors.

If I did go for the Vantage Pro, does anyone know whether my existing Vue data logger/USB interface will work with the Pro, or whether I'd need to buy a new one? I'm keen to avoid shelling out megabucks all over again for what is essentially a bit of flash memory (to store historic readings until they have been copied to Cumulus) and a USB interface.

[AndyKF650]

I noted your comments about weather station upgrades and would say that my experience of the Davis VP2 has been very positive. I have been ran an Oregon system for 6 years using the MeteoHub software interface, and about 2 years ago I upgraded to VP2 also on Meteohub. Since the Meteohub software was very dated and increasingly unreliable I changed to CumulusMX software in August 2020 and have enjoyed the change.

The VP2 cabled system has been very reliable and is connected to my Raspberry Pi via a MeteoPi link which is much less expensive compared to the Davis product. I have also just upgraded the VP2 to VP2 Plus with the addition of a solar sensor with no real problems. Cumulus MX just keeps on going recording data and sending it out to various weather sites.