How to Broadcast a Backyard Weather Station
A recent support question forwarded to me via our Call Center, from Tyler in Christmas Valley, Oregon, is something that was right up my alley, as a weather gadget guy. Tyler was frustrated that his local weather station was so far away, wondered how he could broadcast readings from his farming community, and if that information could feed into AccuWeather's database to improve our forecasts.
The Davis Vantage Vue Weather Station At AccuWeather HQ
Good news, Tyler, it's now less expensive than ever. A year and a half ago when I reviewed the Davis Vantage Vue weather station (shown above), it sold for about $600 when combined with a device to upload it to the Internet (without a computer). Today, the price at AmbientWeather is down to $478 as of this writing. Compared to the original $700 retail, that's quite a price drop. (If you don't want to connect it to a computer or Internet, you can approximately cut that price in half).
The Davis WeatherLinkIP Device
These things used to require a rocket science degree to configure, assemble, and install -- something else that's changed. I installed one of these stations last year at a local school, it's almost ready to go out of the box (see my review). All you need to do is buy the Vantage Vue, the WeatherLinkIP, and a antenna tripod or other mounting option (tripods as low as $25 shipped on Amazon) - or you can mount it to the top of an existing pipe.
Wait for it to arrive in the mail, stick it on a pipe or tripod (you're going to want to pound stakes into the ground so the wind doesn't knock it over), follow the simple setup instructions, and you're online with WeatherLink.com via their map and a webpage like this. For more information on the WeatherLinkIP, read my review of the device).
Make sure to add yourself to the CWOP network during the WeatherLinkIP setup and that will get you on the national government network map at MesoWest, which AccuWeather ingests into our databases to make our forecasts more accurate.
