Thanks for the prompt reply. It appears as though about 2/3 of the stations near me show rate, but my PWS never has. Of those that do, the brand of equipment seems irrelevant. Oh well.
There is another reason why you may see rain rates for surrounding stations and not yours. There are two methods to commonly used to send Rain Rate and they represent two different concepts. They are not related. It is up to the console manufacture or the 3rd party software you are using as to which method is used. There is officially based on WU documentation only supposed to be one method. But in practice and based on what other manufactures and software are doing you then see this other method used.
Typically Acurite stations send Rate Rate to equal the "actual" accumulation of the past 60 minutes.
Where other hardware like Davis, Ambient, and Ecowitt are using "instantaneous" Rain Rate instead. This instantaneous Rain Rate by nature of what it represents shows higher numbers as it is a projection of how much rain would fall if the current intensity of rainfall continued for 1 hour.
So when your station shows 0 in/hr Rain Rate and you see others showing 1 or 2 in/hr then you most likely are looking at other stations that are not Acurite and are using the other "instantaneous" method.
Bottom line is that you can't compare Rain Rates of neighboring stations unless they both are utilizing the same method. You don't need to know what brand they all are. You can just quickly inspect the precipitation graph and it is obvious which station is using which method as they are clear as day different and impossible to confuse.
Both of the following were take from the same hardware rain gauge at the same moment but recorded by two different software onto two different WU IDs. Notice the blue line "total precipitation" is the same on both of these. The Rain Rate methods are represented by the green line.
Instantaneous rate
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Actual accumulation rate
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