After many years, my WMR-968 finally gave up completely and I gave up hunting down replacement sensors, so it’s time for something new. I must admit that I did not follow the product development over the last 5+ years and was wondering if you guys could help me narrowing it down…
What I am looking for:
Horses for courses. . . Oregon Scientific’s WMR200 does it for me, but sells for GBP400 here in UK so maybe over budget? Extra temp (10 channels) and UV sensors available. Careful sensor siting needed to get decent wireless reception, and I had to get USB-over-ethernet adaptors to get the data from the base station on one side of the house to my PC on the other.
Bloomsky might give you everything you want but the jury is still out on the accuracy and reliability. The “you get what you pay for” rule has always applied here. You could get an Accurite station but I have read post after post on the connection problems. You could kick the budget up a bit and get a Davis Vantage Pro2. Price wise it is a bit over your budget but reliability, connectivity, and you can add extra sensors fit your requests. You can buy a basic station and add solar/uv/soil temp/leaf wetness sensors later. You could go cheap with a no name station (like on Wish.com) but it wont be software compatibility with mainstream packages like WD, Cumulus, VWS, or WV32.
Tom_OH, I had a WMR968 that quit on me around December of last year, and I went all of January to April debating about what kind of WS I should replace it with. I’m telling you, I agonized over this - that’s a long time to carry on a debate with yourself, LOL! When I said to myself that I was already familiar with Oregon Scientific I decided to stay with them, and purchased the WMR300 off of Amazon and later found out that customer service sucks if you need it from them. It’s a relatively new weather station, but little did I realize it didn’t have a solar sensor and it wasn’t compatible with my other purchased/licensed weather station software. I contacted OS, and they said they had no plans to add a solar sensor to their hardware lineup. So you may want to stick with something that offers you a solar sensor too if you want to keep that kind of data. My data isn’t useless without it, but I would prefer to be able to log solar data. I almost bought a Davis Instruments Vantage Pro II, but the over-inflated price got to me. I just couldn’t. I also looked at the Vantage Vue, the one-model-down from the Pro II, and I didn’t like the look of the display console. Then I had to factor in that the Weatherlink software for it if you want to publish your data on the web, is $150 on top of the cost of the station. This is not to say that all of this prevented me from spending a whack of money on the WMR300, I just remained with a product name that I was already using. Obviously I didn’t do all of my homework.
I’m not trying to influence your decision, but if I had known that there was no solar sensor and customer service was sadly lacking with my Oregon Scientific WMR300, I would have likely bit the bullet and gone with the Davis Pro II with Weatherlink. Maybe they’ll come down in price when this one decides to quit working.
Best of luck to you. Looking forward to seeing your page when you get it up and running.
If you shop around you will find a more reasonable price on the Davis. Also you can just buy a base unit and add on the Solar/UV sensor later. Also with the Belfryboy logger you can save some bucks. There are ways the Davis can be more affordable.
That is correct. The sensors cant be added to the Vue. I bought a VP2 years ago…then added an Envoy after a paycheck…then months later added solar. Now there are deals on the UV sensor so that will complete it. Yeah…I may have spent more in the long run but I actually got what I wanted without destroying my budget. After 7 years the station is still running strong. The station replaced my WM968 which only lasted 2 years.
I only ever added the solar. Tracking Solar vs UV data from others I’m not convinced adding the much more expensive UV would really gain very much :dontknow: I do have a homemade UV that works well but I’ve never bothered to install it permanently.
Adding UV will make the ISS complete. You know…complete the set. Silly I know…but its just me. I wish it werent still expensive. I would rather have a Boltek but the PCi card is now discontinued and the external units are more expensive.
