Dear Commodore, Felix, Reinhard, Blick, and WeatherCat station installation consultants,
A friend of mine wants to jump into the personal weather station world without even testing the water. He is interested in a new Davis Instruments system. What are your recommendations for a full featured weather station that feeds data to his Mac? He will set up a personal web page too.
The faithful have already given you lots of good advice. Something to consider in addition is how would this station be installed. If budget issues eventually become involved, the Vantage Vue provides a lot of functionality for the money, but that groups all the sensors in one place. On the other hand, a number of us Davis VP-2 owners prefer to have the Anemometer some distance away from the other instruments and use a separate data transmitter that Davis sells.
Before your friend jumps and spends money, tell him to spend a little time trying to figure out how he would install that station. It might save him some time and narrow down some of the choices.
Cheers, Edouard
P.S. Another potential consideration is whether or not you need your instruments within reach of AC power. This could be important if you want to have a heater to melt snow or perhaps use an AC power fan to aspirate your temperature probe. Here is a thread with the technique I use to keep my temperature probe exposed to flowing air:
http://athena.trixology.com/index.php?topic=1865.msg16710#msg16710