Topic: Has anyone ever gotten reception from another weather station

[MchWxEnthusiast]

By this I mean, has anyone ever gotten some type of reception through their console that's not from their weather station?

[jackman]

I have not had that happen but it's entirely possible. You may need to change your station ID to another channel.

[MchWxEnthusiast]

how do I do that?

[CW2274]

how do I do that?

Pages 9-11. Save the link.

https://www.davisinstruments.com/product_documents/weather/manuals/07395-249_IM_06152.pdf

[archae86]

By this I mean, has anyone ever gotten some type of reception through their console that's not from their weather station?

When I first unboxed my Davis Vantage Pro2, my console was receiving channel 1 both from my own ISS and from one owned by a neighbor hundreds of feet away. The resulting display on the console was very confusing, as it more or less combined results from the two sources in a way which was not an accurate representation of either.

It took me some hours to tumble home to the possibility and to figure out how to change the reception channel I was using.

Further clarification took many months. The first candidate undesired source station that I noticed was almost 1400 feet away from my station and I was dazzled to think that the Davis RF was good enough for the signal actually to be received. Only months later did I notice that there was another much more plausible candidate station just under 500 feet away.

Plenty of people posting here have had difficulty which ultimately traced to receiving data from somebody else's station. I don't think the Davis set up instructions of a decade ago at least were really written with the thought that a nearby owner of another station was a very likely possibility.

[JohnsIsland]

Company I work for has a "few" weather stations installed.  After my first install and finding the default transmitter ID was already in use by a neighbor, I have always configured new stations with transmitter ID's 2-7.  I don't want the hassle of finding a neighbor has a weather station using the default, and I don't want the chance someone will install a weather station in the future with the default ID.

Jeff

[Mattk]

For sure and can especially occur when the local installation is obstructed between the ISS and Console by buildings, walls, enclosures etc. Have seen a signal from several hundred metres way override a local ISS/Console with around 30 metres separation   

[azchrisf]

The bad thing for me is with a full setup I have no ability to change channels if a neighbor gets one. I would have to take down a transmitter lol.

I wish Davis would have made the ability to use 16, 64 or 256 ids...wouldn’t be hard to do 16 or 24 with a different or additional dip switch.

[johnd]

I wish Davis would have made the ability to use 16, 64 or 256 ids...wouldn’t be hard to do 16 or 24 with a different or additional dip switch.

AIUI that's a limitation of the TI CC1100 wireless chipset that Davis uses. No way that's going to change now I would have thought - I'm not aware of any more powerful/flexible successor chips in the same range that remain compatible with the legacy ones.

For anyone that does want more than 8 sensor transmitters then a switch to a Davis Enviromonitor (EM) station perhaps with an IP gateway would be the solution I suspect. The EM ZigBee wireless allows effectively unlimited nodes/transmitters (though rumour has it that maybe 50 is the practical limit, but remember that each node has 4 connectors for sensors). As an added bonus, ZigBee is a mesh network with each node being able to act as a repeater if required and with the mesh apparently self-healing if one node goes out. The downside is that weatherlink.com needs to be used to cope with the data flows from an EM station and hence subscriptions are unavoidable.

[azchrisf]

Thank you John didn't know that was a chipset limitation, not that they were using zigbees for the enviromonitor systems!

[johnd]

I don't pretend to be an electronics engineer so someone more knowledgeable might be able to shed further light. But to dig one level deeper: my amateur picture is that there are actually 64 'time-slots' available on the VP2 wireless system but Davis chose to allow up to 8 daisy-chained repeaters on each of the 8 'primary' channels, which then uses up the 64 slots.

I suppose in theory these repeater slots could be reallocated given that repeaters are used only rarely. But given also that few users actually use all 8 channels then I suspect that there's not much call for what would probably be a breaking change in the wireless architecture, especially when the EM stations now exist as a solution for users who do want more channels or sensors. Total speculation on my part but I do sometimes wonder whether an EM 'Junior' system might emerge as a VP3 whenever that might happen, though EM nodes do seem to be more power-hungry than VP2 transmitters and consequently have more solar power provision, which all works fine but does inevitably add to cost a bit.

[Mattk]

Well it could be very interesting in the future if Davis decide to change directions with say wireless architecture etc and essentially EOL stations simply by shutting down the cloud component. So called EOL and the cloud in some other markets has become a means to force users to upgrade or at least loose most of their functionality making users equipment essentially useless.