Author Topic: HOBO U30 Dataloggers  (Read 901 times)

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Offline havtrail

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    • Haverford Weather Station
HOBO U30 Dataloggers
« on: August 10, 2018, 01:13:29 PM »
Early this year I revived a 10-year old HOBO weather monitoring station made by Onset Computer Corp, as a volunteer for the township I live in. It was based on Onset's HOBO U30 datalogger, in particular the U30-GSM version that offers remote operation with cellular data uploads to their HOBOlink server. Once our unit was functioning again, it turned out that it detected no cellular signal strength from the cell service provider. A call to Onset revealed that the U.S. cell service providers that Onset uses (including AT&T and T-Mobile) had completed switching off 2G support in their towers at the end of 2017.

The onsetcomp.com website shows the U30 was "Discontinued" but it is worse that that. The cell carriers had actually made all existing U30-GSM units obsolete and unusable for remote connection. (Note: the unit also has inside it a Mini-B USB port, so you can go to the station with a laptop running HOBOware software and the proper USB cable and manually upload the data in the U30 to the laptop.) In effect this makes the U30-GSM the functional equivalent of the less-capable U30-NRC that Onset still offers. Nothing on Onset's website indicated that the U30-GSM was 2G-based or that remote connection from an existing unit was no longer possible. "Discontinued" in my mind implies "no longer sold," which is different than "Obsolete" which implies "no longer works" and is the worse situation that actually exists now.

Onset has since "discontinued" both its U30-WIF Wi-Fi version and the U30-ETH cabled network version as well, so trekking to the U30 and manually downloading the saved data is the only remaining U30 option still offered by the company, although I believe these versions should still be usable by people that have them.

Onset had introduced in 2017 a newer replacement datalogger, the RX3003 cellular unit, which uses 3G technology. The newer RX3000 family of dataloggers includes the RX3001 (Ethernet), the RX3002 (Wi-Fi) and the 3G-based cellular RX3003.

I am posting this so that the situation is clear to anyone looking to buy or revive a new or used HOBO U30 datalogger.

Rich K.
Onset HOBO RX2102 Cellular
https://www.havtrail.com/weather/
NEWA https://newa.cornell.edu Haverford, PA

 

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