Weather Station Hardware > What Weather Station Should I Buy?

Which Software for Vantage Pro 2?

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Pinster56:
I am about to purchase a VP2. I am really interested in getting it connected to my PC so I can get my data published on the Internet. I have been in touch with Ambient Weather who is offering me a good price. Now I know I need the WeatherLink data logger, but what else do I really need? Ambient Weather says I need to buy the Virtual Weather Station Internet Edition (for an additional $79) in order to report to the Weather Exchange. Is this true? I don't want to buy unnecessary sofware unless I will find it useful!

ncpilot:
You can publish your weather to the web with only Weatherlink software--which is included with the data logger... it may not be as pretty as other software, but it works out of the box, its FTP works too (VWS can be very flaky apparently).

I've had my Davis for almost 2 years and haven't purchased any other weather software--yet. Just depends on how ambitious you want to be with your web page.

Weather Exchange certainly isn't a requirement to post your own data to the web--I don't know off hand the advantage of using Weather Exchange... if it's a matter of getting data from other personal weather stations in your area, you might be able to use other means.

You can post to Weather Underground (without any additional software), which then provides RSS feeds of all the participating personal weather station data in your area...

Just some alternative ideas...

saratogaWX:
I too ran my one-page site for almost 2 years on WeatherLink alone.. then I got 'hooked' and have Weather-Display and WeatherLink running (and VWS too) thanks to SoftWX VirtualVP which allows multiple weather software to share the same VP console data.
http://www.softwx.com/weather/virtualvp.html

For an idea about what the respective weather software packages offer, and Gary Oldham's sage commentary, click on the Software Reviews button above ( or http://www.wxforum.net/reviews.php ).  I found it quite valuable and helped me pick WD as my main package (and continue WeatherLink for the graphs and NOAA reports).

Best regards,
Ken

Anole:
The short and sweet of the SW I use from my point of view and experience:

1) Weatherlink:
Pros: Overall works well. Graphics are nicely lightweight. Reliable FTP. Easy to setup and work with overall.
Cons: Limited set of tags. The grid lines on the plot graphics often look skewed (depending on the time frame being graphed) because of the offsets of the dashed lines.

While Davis support is outstanding for their hardware I can't speak to their support for weatherlink.

2) VWS
Pros: Very easy to set up and work with overall. Very pretty graphics. Lots of tags.
Cons: Unreliable. You should plan on using other options to handle any and all of the web functions as they are the primary culprit. Jpeg is the only option for the graphics and graphic file sizes are larger than they need to be. Support sucks.

3) Weather Display
Pros: Wealth of tags. Many many options that others don't offer (built-in WYSIWYG page editor for example). Reliable. Outstanding support from both Brian the author (who never sleeps) and weather-watch.com contributors. If you have a question about how to do something (see the cons below) you'll get an answer pretty quick.
Cons: Because of it's complexity and organic growth over the years, it can be a real bear at times to get it set up or try to make it do certain specific things. I personally don't like the look of the graphics (that's an asthetic choice though).

I use all three through VirtualVP (another outstanding piece of SW) but if forced to choose only one, I'd go with WD.

Mark / Ohio:
Tell us how you really feel Anole.   :lol:

Only thing I could really add to that is I had a WeatherLink issue of some sort when I was on dialup.  The fellow I talked to via email was nice but he did not know the answer and I don't recall ever hearing from up the ladder from one of the software guys.  I found a work around on my own over time.  But that's been several years ago now.

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