Author Topic: What Happens if Your Neighbor Also Install a Weather Station (2 nearby stations)  (Read 1143 times)

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Offline galfert

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I live in a typical planned neighborhood where the houses are maybe 20 feet apart side to side and 50 feet back yard to back yard (house to house).

What happens if my neighbor decides to install an Ambient Weather station? How will my Ambient Weather station WS-2902 console know which outside array to listen to? I don't see anything in the manual to address any pairing. I also don't see anything mentioned in the ObserverIP manual other than selecting a model number, but that is probably for proper identification of the data numbers rather than selectively listening to a specific device over the 915 MHz frequency.

My nextdoor neighbor might not put a weather station but a couple houses down might and since these things supposedly have a range of 300 ft with a typical range of about 150 ft taking walls into account I'm concerned of what might happen. I've read that Davis owners have an ID that they can set so that they can run multiple stations without issues. But with Ambient I don't see a solution.

I've also read here on this forum that some people are running multiple weather stations without issue but they are mixing different brands.

« Last Edit: May 16, 2018, 02:27:07 PM by galfert »
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Offline dolfs

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I have been in this situation with two (Ambient) stations at one house during a transition. What I found found is that may be you can have your console or software display the sensor (type) ID, but if you cannot, or even if you can but both are of the same type, you still won't know which one is "hooked up".

Generally, when you first power up a console or ObserverIP it goes on the lookout for RF transmissions from the/a sensor. I do not know whether it waits until it possible sees multiple transmissions from possibly different sensors and then selects on the basis of signal strength, but it does not appear that way to me. My situation involved different models (different IDs) of outside and inside sensors, but both outdoor types were supported by both devices. It appeared my console/OIP would select the first one from which a transmission was received, and then "stay" with that one.

I needed to power cycle and play with timing of that to "catch" the sensor I wanted. If both happen to be almost synchronized in timing, this would be next to impossible to do and you may need to remove batteries from one, or press the outdoor reset, to de-synchronize them and allow locking in to the desired one this way. Suffice it to say this would not work if one of the multiple is a neighbor's!

I don't know what would happen if there are two sensors with the same ID (model). I can easily see that there is nothing unique about either sensor that way and you would alternately receive data from either unit. Whether that would show up in software, where reporting might be in largish intervals, remains to be seen. If both are received in a single reporting/updating interval, you might just see the last one. Either way, this scenario could be problematic with no workaround I can think of.

If you are in control of all sensors involved, one possible solution is to have multiple console/OIP share the same outdoor sensor and simply take the other one down.
--dolf

Ambient WS-1400-IP + MeteoBridge