VP Live and WL

I’m brand new to transmitting wx data over the internet, so forgive me if this is a no brainer for you guys. If I’m running VPLive, do I need to also run Weatherlink? Or is it an either/or situation? All seems to be going well just running VPLive and I like how it runs in the background.

Thanks a bunch for any info.

– Laura
KI6AOK

The answer kind of depends on what you want to do. If all you are doing for example is sending data to CWOP/APRS, then VPLive would be all you need. But I would recommend that you use both programs. Use VPLive for live weather data and CWOP submissions, and use WeatherLink for maintaining a permanent data archive (something it does well). VPLive can then also use the weather archive to initialize long running totals like 24 hour rain when VPLive starts up. There are two features in VPLive that accomodate this scenario. One is a feature that causes VPLive to briefly run WeatherLink when VPLive first starts (and before it connects) so that WeatherLink can bring the archive data up to date. VPLive will then use the archive data in the WeatherLink file to initialize some of the running weather totals. The second feature is one where VPLive occasionally disconnects from the VP and briefly runs WeatherLink so it can update keep the archive file up to date. You can configure it so WeatherLink only gets run once a day, or every few hours.

If you want to do more that that, you can use VirtualVP to connect multiple weather programs to your VP station, with all the stations able to get live data. Then you could run VPLive, WeatherLink, and even WeatherDisplay (as well as other programs) all at the same time. This is useful if you have a website and like to take advantage of different features from several programs.

Steve
SoftWx

The key to this is really to run VirtualVP, then you can run other weather programmes as Steve says above.
My website is run using this programme for multiple weather programmes. It gives a lot of flexibility into what can be displayed and enables additional redundancy on weather records too.