Davis offers WeatherLink Network subscriptions

[Sigdigit]

Bushman, that is true about the microclimates.  Dalecoy, MADIS will flag my data as erroneous because the valley effect will make my data very different at times from stations just a couple miles away.  But the data is that way because of the topography, and even the CWOP analysis acknowleges that.  It is not different because as dl says, some people don't even bother with solar radiation shielding, or crappy sensor placement on a hot roof or next to something creating rain shadows or heat sinks.  My data is interesting because of the topography and at least my location pics show there is nothing creating errors.  There are so many stations that you can't even verify decent sensor placement, so rather than look at the data as interesting, I regard it as suspect due to poor or uncalibrated equipment, or lousy sensor placement.  Sorry for veering so far off the original topic.

[dalecoy]

  Sorry for veering so far off the original topic.

So am I.  Perhaps you would start a new topic to discuss data usefulness?

[crmw]

It doesn't work outside the USA, Davis rejecting suscriptions, at least in Spain.

 I wonder if that is temporary.  Davis does have many WLIP accounts located outside the US.

I received my subscription details yesterday here in Australia, it took 2 - 3 weeks to obtain however, as it had to be purchased through an Australian Davis agent.

I have noted my updates on my weatherlink page are as frequent as i'd like them to be, the FAQ suggests its every minute:
How often does the data logger send data to the website? How current is "current?"

Current conditions are sent every minute (60 seconds) from your data logger to the WeatherLink website.

However my updates are at intervals of 5 minutes plus, has anyone else experienced this?

[johnd]

However my updates are at intervals of 5 minutes plus, has anyone else experienced this?

Are you sure that you're not getting confused with how often your browser auto-refreshes? If the WLv6 works the same way as WLIP then the data updates are indeed sent every minute but the browser refreshes itself only every 5 minutes (presumably to limit the load on the weatherlink.com server). But if you manually refresh your browser (eg F5) at the intermediate time points then you'll see that there is indeed new data there.

[crmw]

Yes, the browser refresh rate is at 5 minutes, I had several stations open in separate tabs at once and the 5 minute refresh was fairly consistent, so it sounds like that's the issue.

[dalecoy]

Yes, the browser refresh rate is at 5 minutes, I had several stations open in separate tabs at once and the 5 minute refresh was fairly consistent, so it sounds like that's the issue.

It's technically not an "issue" - it's a "feature".  It's set by Davis, and you can't change it.

If you look at the page source of any of those stations, you will see: 
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="300">
Which means - refresh every 300 seconds.

The vast majority of web pages that you visit, do not automatically refresh at all, of course.

[johnd]

It's technically not an "issue" - it's a "feature".  It's set by Davis, and you can't change it.

Strictly speaking, I would say 'the average user can't change it'. But it would presumably be a fairly easy matter for anyone used to coding browser add-ons to intercept these page calls and change 300 to some other value. Actually don't I recall when this topic was discussed previously someone saying that there are already browser utilities that will do this for you? Was one of them called Refresher?

Whether it's worth or desirable to do this is another matter of course. Weatherlink.com is not designed as a genuinely real-time  (ie updates every few seconds) service so you're never going to see individual wind gusts or the like. Few other weather parameters change on a timescale of seconds and for most parameters updates every 5 minutes are perfectly adequate to monitor the current weather conditions. More frequent updates really add little.

And then the more often the updates obviously the more that the Davis server is going to be loaded. Too many users trying to update eg every minute might encourage Davis to intervene and control such accesses.

[dalecoy]

I agree on all those points.

[crmw]

It's technically not an "issue" - it's a "feature".  It's set by Davis, and you can't change it.

Well yes, more to the point it was my issue, however i now have a better understanding, so not any issue anymore.

I am curious though to what one would expect their upload data to be. I am uploading direct to WeatherLink and utilising their upload options to further upload to Weather Underground, and as such have disabled the dedicated weather underground module. However i have noticed it chew through my upload data to the tune of several hundred mb per day, does this sound right? Based on the presumption its uploading to WeatherLink every minute.