Please fully read below before voting aboveIt has recently come to my attention that there are certain smart devices that use weather data. But some of these smart devices only talk to certain weather services. Weather Underground is probably the most popular personal weather network with the most amount of stations. Some of these devices won't talk to Weather Underground.
What some pepople are doing is getting frustrated that their personal smart device does not get data from Weather Underground, but instead only gets data from less popular weather networks like PWSweather (WeatherForYou) for example. So some of these frustrated people are taking matters into their own hands and scraping the data from someone else's WU data and creating their own PWSweather station over that other person's house. This now becomes a newly published station on another weather network service that the owner of the real station can't control. Data is not timely often. It requires that the other person that took the data to maintain their system up and running... And the person that took the WU data and republished can call the new station on the other network anything they want that my be offensive or misspelled. And the WU Station Owner has no recourse to find out who did this nor how to contact them. It also affects the quality of the other weather networks.
This is happening very frequently. If you are a WU Station Owner and you don't publish to PWSweather.com I implore you to go over to their weather map and see if you show up. They aren't just publishing you over there they are also publishing you to a lesser extent over to CWOP.
https://www.pwsweather.com/tools.php (look for station at or near your location, click station icon, then Detailed observations)
and
https://aprs.fi (look for blue WX icon at or near your location, click Info, then click Show weather charts)
When looking at locations at or near you compare the data to see if it matches your data. You can even unplug for an hour and create a gap and see if the gap shows up in these other networks to confirm the data is coming from your WU station.
For what I'll call fake or ghost stations to show up on CWOP is bound to upset a lot of people. CWOP station owners take much pride in making sure their quality reporting is the best that it can be and they are affected by neighbor stations. No offense but lots of WU stations don't measure up to the level of quality that CWOP stations have. Just by nature of anyone easily publishing to WU with cheaper hardware versus what is required for CWOP. And because most WU stations are just regular people that just want their weather on an app and they aren't taking the time to necessarily calibrate or maintain their stations. What a nightmare for CWOP this could present. Luckily I think most of these frustrated people don't go the CWOP route but go instead to putting up fake or ghost PWSweather stations. The people doing don't care about other metrics being correct other than rainfall numbers. They don't care if they junk up an important weather network like CWOP (MADIS). I'm sure it is not their intention but that is what they are doing.
I don't want to mention by name exactly who is doing this because I don't want those people to Google search and end up here and learning from yet another place that this is a possible solution to their frustration.
So in this message thread if you follow up do not spell out the word R*A*C*H*I*O. I spelled it that way so that it wouldn't be picked up on a search. That is the brand name of the irrigation controller that will not connect to Weather Underground. That company has stated in their blog that it would cost them 6x more to license from WU what they now get from Aeris which only gives them access to PWSweather and CWOP (MADIS).
My question for discussion is if you think it is okay for these people that have these devices to publish their own fake station ID and data over your house just because you don't publish to this other network. Just because it benefits them and with no care that they are polluting other weather networks with possibly less than optimal data that could affect other people's quality controls.
I suppose if you don't want that to happen to you then you should consider publishing to these other networks (but if you publish to CWOP please uphold the quality of data that that network expects). But that is easier said than done as it requires more investment and effort to be able to publish to other places than WU.
I personally think it is wrong for these people to do this. They should pluck down and get their own station hardware and publish it where they need. Or don't buy that brand device as I think Hydrawise is better anyway and does access WU data. The R brand device company has admitted that they are too cheap to bear the added expense. Yet Hydrawise (now owned by Hunter) manages to pay WU what it cost to give their customers access for free to airport METAR data and $5 /month to use your own WU Station.
I you agree or disagree that is cool. Everyone is entitled to their opinion without being lambasted. Please share your thoughts. I'll respect your opinion but please don't use the R brand name in this thread. That is how you show respect for my opinion. I don't want to drive those people here via search and give them this solution.
Thank you for fully reading. Now don't forget to vote in the poll above... Just scroll up.