I guess as a new Weatherlink user this is what confuses me. So WLIP updates the “live” weather seen on WeatherLink.com every 60 seconds but there is an archive sent every 60 minutes? If WL.com is getting data every 60 seconds why aren’t they recording it, what is the “archive”? What’s the point of it?
The console + IP logger together actually generate 3 kinds of data:
1. Real-time data, which is a new data packet available every 2-3 seconds and which, most importantly, contains the individual wind gust data (but along with all the other sensor data of course);
2. Current conditions which is the once per minute data that the IP logger uploads;
3. Archive data which is a packet or record of data summarising data over a finite period - the archive interval (30 mins by default, but 5 or 10 mins are common alternative settings).
You wouldn't want to store all of the real-time data because (a) it would use a lot of storage; and (b) only the wind data changes by the second and so a lot of the other sensor data would be repeated often without changing at all, hence the idea of summarising the real-time data into archive data for long-term records-keeping and analysis.
The current conditions data is mostly only used by the IP logger. I suspect that Davis didn't like the idea of uploading largely redundant data 20 or 30 times a minute, but uploading only eg at 10 or 15 or 30 minutes was too infrequent. Hence the introduction of the once per minute current conditions data.
