I have been curious how does the FARS on my Davis VP2 + compare with a standard radiation (passive) shield. When I purchased my FARS from Archer, I had him leave the temp/humid sensor in the unit (paid extra for it). Then I took the old sensor and put it into a standard shield and put it near the FARS, but enough so no interferences. That lead to needing a second Envoy so I could set it to only track certain sensors. The Dataloggers do not track all the sensors, unless you get into an Envoy 8x which is for data gathering and a whole different set of things that happen.
Weather Display logs all the data from the envoy regardless of what the datalogger does, Brian set that up and it is great on the data end.
In any case, I plotted the data with the weather link on the attached URL image. there is a difference, definitely as we suspected there would be. The Fars runs cooler , anywhere from exactly the same or 3-4 degrees cooler than the non-Fars and the humidity can either be the same or slightly cooler, but not much, which was interesting to me. I then added the solar energy option to the third panel to see the relationships between the maximum energy and not.. I am curious to see how they compare in the cold winter months with snow and ice and bunny turds in the snow.
Finally the big lesson of the day. The Crawl space, notice that the line stops and then continues? Ok.. I rigged the ISS that I replaced the supercap eventually with to a 1/2 inch PVC sheet with JB weld (Niko, thank you) and that to a post mount so I could use the solar panel to power the passive sensor... Anyway.... When I swapped them out, I changed the dip switch settings so the data stream would be the same and when I went into the cellar to install the temperature probe into the temperature block, I just plugged it in and took off. Then I noticed the big data gap.. When I went down to see what was happening, I noticed I plugged the temperature sensor into the wind slot. Lesson: always double check your connections.
