What would you recommend?

[barnsleynick]

Hi, I've been thinking of what weather station I could get that can be used to replace my Watson W8681 when it eventually dies or before hopefully.

It needs to have:
-Wireless connection to base station
-Wind vane
-Anemometer
-Rain gauge
-Thermo-hydro sensor (temp, humidity, pressure, dewpoint, windchill)
-A PC connection so it can be linked to Cumulus

Basically everything that the W8681 offers and then some hopefully. It will be mounted on my roof.

I'd pay upto £200, maybe £225 or £250 if its very good.

Ive seen loads of weather stations on the net, but I just dont know which one would suit my needs and reach and supprass the accuracy, value and features of the W8681.

Any recommendations would be greatly appreiciated

Thankyou in advance!

[steve]

I think the problem is that to see a significant improvement beyond a Fine Offset, you have to spend quite a bit more and go to a Davis Vantage Vue (approx £450 including logger and PC connection). From what I've seen, I could never recommend that anyone buy a La Crosse station, which would fit your proposed price bracket.

There are other stations around £200 or so which Cumulus doesn't support (yet) - for example, the Peet Bros ones are quite good, I hear.

Sorry, that wasn't much help.

[barnsleynick]

I think the problem is that to see a significant improvement beyond a Fine Offset, you have to spend quite a bit more and go to a Davis Vantage Vue (approx £450 including logger and PC connection). From what I've seen, I could never recommend that anyone buy a La Crosse station, which would fit your proposed price bracket.

There are other stations around £200 or so which Cumulus doesn't support (yet) - for example, the Peet Bros ones are quite good, I hear.

Sorry, that wasn't much help.

Thanks for the info, but whats the downside of La Crosse stations?
And I will look into the Davis stations, maybe Father Christmas could bring me one? hahaha

[steve]

Thanks for the info, but whats the downside of La Crosse stations?

Well, they don't seem to me to offer any advantages over the Fine Offset stations. But I'm probably biased against them as they are complete pigs to write software for...

[GraemeT]

From a user's perspective, the downside of La Crosse is the lack of native usb, hence it must connect to a 'real' COM port.
Price isn't really on our side either.

My experience with usb to rs-232 adapters has shown that very few, if any, work properly with my La Crosse WS-2355.
If you have a proper COM port on your pc (rare these days) the unit performs quite well.
My fear is having to (potentially) replace the weather station if my motherboard dies!


Cheers,

[Gordon-Loomberah]

Thanks for the info, but whats the downside of La Crosse stations?

I have a WS 2350 sitting in its box if you want one cheap so you can find out for yourself I had no problems with the USB-Serial converter, the weather station itself was the problem. Very unreliable - many missed readings, often for hours at a time, and too long between updates when used wirelessly (128sec between wind speed samples is completely useless). There were other problems too, but I try not to think about them, now I have a Davis VP2

[werribee_au]

Graeme, you could always slot a rs232 card into the motherboard.

The usb-serial adaptor I have works extremely well it is a comsol brand purchased from Harris Technology some years ago, sadly they do not carry this particular model any more. So if anyone sees one of these (See pics) snap it up.

The background is I first bought a targus usb-serial adaptor to use for work but I couldn't get it to work on the particular piece of equipment I wanted to program, worked with anything else though. I then tried the above mentioned one that my technical manager had and it worked so I picked one up. We have later found that only this particular brand works with piece of equipment (Which is an E100 interface for a Mitsubishi FX2 PLC).

I don't currently use it as my current Toshiba notebook has a real serial port, but I'll never let my comsol adaptor go!