Portable Weather Station

Reviews

I bought this at the end of December 2008, when it was too cold to go about setting it up. I'm mixed on how much I like it. The system is fairly easy to use but has a couple of quirks that have to be sorted out. Dislpay Unit - The power transformer for the display unit makes a lot of noise and may be defective. It's made to sit on a table or counter. The push button interface is easy to use but makes a loud beep whenever you push to select something--the volume can't be toned down and would wake-up my wife in the bedroom if it were upstairs in our office--I keep it in the kitchen. The interface itself is well laid out and fairly intuitive. The mounting hardware for the sensors is mostly designed to be setup on a 1 1/2" round pole. I got a wooden one and had to weatherproof it, then fashioned a way to mount it on our deck--a roof might be better but that's more work and not easy to access for adjustments. The temperature sensing might be skewed if mounted on a hot roof too. I like seeing the unit on my deck from inside (it's not pretty with all the wires between sensors and communication units) because I can get a quick visual look at the anemometer (wind guage) to know what the breeze is like outside before I go running. The anemometer works well. It'll take some work to get the wind direction showing correctly on the display unit. Most of the wireless devices communicate well (one exception explained below) with the base unit once you get it all setup. The rain gauge and hydrometer sensors don't mount on a pole. The rain gauge needs to be mounted on a flat surface and will screw into wood. The hydrometer is designed to be screwed onto a flat vertical wall or post. It's good to have these in somewhat accessible spaces so that you can change batteries or adjust the angle of the corresponding communications units for better solar conversion. I haven't had the units mounted long enough to tell how much power the units are getting from the solar cells vs. the backup batteries. I see periodic red LED lights going on to indicate communication activity. The one exception that I've had to getting this all to work has been the rain guage. The communication unit doesn't seem to work. Between the weather, having time to tinker and to get the pole setup it took me several months before I could tell that the rain guage wasn't working so instead of Amazon, I'll have to go back to Oregon Scientific to sort out an exchange of the defective parts. One other thing, the instructions for setup are very minimal--really they are kind of poor. To get the batteries working you have to unscrew/screw a whole lot of tiny screws. It's not easy to do once you've mounted this outside on a pole.

968 weather station I have e-mailed 2 times and never get any response fron Oregon Scientific. Very poor communication. T A

Great hardware but the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. As with many products the documentation appears to be written by engineers instead of professional writers. Overall the product works great and I am pleased with the weather system. Fred

great shipping and price! wind speed doesn't work, not great instructions, other than that...seems to be accurate.