I live on a ranch in Chihuahua, Mexico. We are a high desert climate at 5018 feet. We have extreme weather changes in fairly rapid succession, high winds, monsoon rains. Our home is right on a nice northerly flowing river. We own 300 meters on the river. Our internet comes to us through the air. Winds impact its speed. We typically have 8 mbps download and .9 mbps upload. There is no option for faster speed. We have very strong sun. Lots of pollen from the cottonwoods and willows by the river. This may be irrelevant, but we also have lots of birds of all sizes. We are a birdwatchers paradise. I hope that gives you some helpful information about our location
The questions I have are as follows:
With my limited internet speed can I upload data to the various services such as Weather Underground?
Yes your Internet speed is comparable to standard DSL speeds even here in the US. You don't need fast Internet for a weather station data upload. The speed you have would work just fine. For example to upload to Weather Underground would probably use up 9 MB a day total. You didn't mention if you have a monthly data cap. Speed is not an issue and total monthly bandwidth usage should not be a problem either unless you have a severely limited monthly data cap allowance.
I use a VPN to provide me with a US IP address for business purposes. Will this interfere with a weather service identifying our location? Is there a way to let the services know our location by other than an IP address? Our little town does not have any weather service location points. It would be great to be able to broadcast our weather on line for tourists who come here to know the weather in advance. We are not near any cities.
Weather station hardware/software doing the upload to the various online weather services or websites does not use your IP address to determine your location. I don't see a technical reason why using a VPN would present a problem. It should work just the same. The only reason a VPN sometimes presents a problem is if that VPN endpoint/service has been blacklisted by the service you are trying to upload to. For example VPN's are used to get Netflix content when you are not in the given region, but Netflix has done some work to try and curb this behaviour with some VPN providers. I'm not aware of any weather services like Weather Underground that do this nor that would care what your IP address is nor if you are using a VPN or not.
Your location is determined by you when you set up the account with the given service. As you create your station ID you tell them where you are located. Then you upload data with the credentials for the ID and it gets posted for that station no matter where the data comes from. That is how Weather Underground works and the same is true for many other online services. I upload to about 13 online weather services and they all work with the same principle.
It will be easy for us to mount a unit wherever would be best for accurate readings. Our house has thick adobe walls, but hopefully we can place the outdoor unit(s) so the signal will penetrate the wall. I think I need a fairly rugged unit but would prefer to begin with something around $300 or less. I hope all this helps you to help me. It is a four hour drive to get our mail. Reliability is important for us as we have to drive long distances to get to stores. I have a mail service in New Mexico where I get all my shipping delivered. Reliable "stuff" is good for us.
$300 is enough to get an Ecowitt weather station....you can check out their website and send them an email to place your order. They ship world wide. There are several models to pick from with different sensors. Its ruggedness though is not going to be spectacular but it isn't terrible either. The next jump would be a big jump into a Davis Vantage Pro 2 station that will be very durable....but the price is at least double or more depending on options. I'd recommend skipping the Davis Vue even though I know that there are plenty of people with these and no problems. For me it is a big gamble to get the Vue that has no replacement parts. The Vantage Pro 2 is better supported with all parts available.
Thanks so very much for any guidance or counsel. I am very appreciative of your time.
best,
Portolan - Phil
Best of luck to you. I encourage you to look at this forum under the different brands and see what other people are using and you can read how they like them and you can read about the issues they face.
