I've had Rainwise stations for some time, and look back thinking I coveted and finally bought one of their original (green) tipping bucket rain collectors what seems a couple decades ago.
I had Mark III stations with the 400 Mhz range for some time, and when the LR 2 gig stations became available, got several of those off eBay too.
In general, built well and functioned well. However as they dropped service and support for the 400 MHz stations, those were relegated to less interesting applications and now all but 2 have failed.
My LR version failed this last fall and despite a lot of effort wasn't fixable and Rainwise told me they'd have to have the whole shebang back to try to fix it, rather than just the boards to troubleshoot. The shipping expense made me take the station down and make my five Oracle Mark III LR displays go dark, with quite a few negative comments from family as to where the clock and temp info went.
I never thought to check further, but it turns out that Rainwise still makes more than just cellular stations, and there is a version of Mark III LR that has either a tipping bucket rain gauge or not.
The placement of the black plastic rain gauge right next to the radiation shield housing the temp and humidity sensors never thrilled me. The unit without the gauge seems not only cheaper but a lot more likely to give temps that are accurate.
I have tried to reach Rainwise, but they are using some sort of blocking filter which thinks my IP address is a scam and when try to get through to them, am blocked.
Of course their phone number is on their home page, which I cannot get to.
Here's my question: I have a bunch of tipping bucket gauges, including those from the old stations, which work just fine. I am hoping that I can take a new MarkIII unit from Rainwise, without the tipper, and route a wire up into the sensor/board unit and find that the board inside it has the terminals to just attach one of my current tippers, thus saving about a hundred bucks and also be able to slightly remote mount the collector to eliminate the local heating problem.
Does anyone have info on the internal board for the current batch of Rainwise units? Is the inner board the same, and just needs to have a tipper plugged into it? Or did they make a separate board without this function on it(seems odd to do that)?
If anyone has had experience in doing exactly what I want to do and has knowledge of the insides, please let me know. Of course I'm still looking for their phone number....
Dale
