Best Hardware Upgrade for 2023?

[GreenwoJ]

Hi folks,

I'm currently running an ancient Fine Offset weather station, with various bits starting to fail

If you were looking to install a new station today, which hardware would you pick to work with Cumulus?

Chat soon.

[broadstairs]

Well I guess it depends on budget. Money no object I'd say David VP2, budget an Ecowitt station, I replaced my VP1 with a GW1103 as I'm retired now and money matters

Stuart

[water01]

I would agree with Stuart it depends what you can afford. The Ecowitt range is a good replacement for the Fine Offset range. I cannot fault my HP2551 and Ecowitt's customer service.

[GreenwoJ]

Cheers guys,

Totally honest, I've not looked at a budget yet

So do the Ecowitt stations connect to CumulusMX via USB?

Chat soon.

[SamiS]

Ecowitt stations are network based, most of the models use wifi, but gw2000 has a lan port also. If you do not need a display console, the cheapest way is to go with gw1100 and select the sensor array that best suits your needs. Personally I’m running HP2551 with an added gw1100 to support running two instances of Cumulus (”test” and ”production”).

There is an excellent comparison table of Ecowitt models and their clones on wxforum, but you must register to the forum to see all the content as they are images.

https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=40730.0

[water01]

So do the Ecowitt stations connect to CumulusMX via USB?

As stated they are network based and much more reliable than the old Fine Offset USB connection which was prone to dropouts. If you are worried about history you set up the station (in my case a HP2551) to upload to ecowitt.net and CumulusMX is able to use the Ecowitt API to download history from Ecowiit. Obviously if your Internet connection drops out this may cause a loss of data, but to be honest this hasn't happened to me since I bought my HP2551 in September 2021.

I, like SamiS, have bought 2 GW1100 as test beds as well, and my weather station provides data to all three. They are so affordable at £27 each it was no brainer. See the Ecowitt shop on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/ecowitt ... 79B5E4DEB7