Dear Dave and WeatherCat members of the
"wouldn't you really rather have a Davis" club,
I was wondering if there are any precautions I need to take when I switch from one to the other.
You have some very good questions and as far as I can recall they have never been answered before. You will probably need Stu's authoritative opinion on some of these matters.
I plan to set up the Davis and make sure everything's working, shutdown the mac, swap the USB from the Maplin to the Davis, then reboot and make sure Weathercat can see the station.
Seems like a reasonable strategy. Just to double-check, have you ordered a Mac data logger to go with the Vantage Vue? You need that additional hardware to connect to your Mac.
I think the Davis deals with rain totals differently. Is that going to confuse Weathercat somewhere along the line? I suspect there are more differences than this too.
Unfortunately, I don't know for sure. However, WeatherCat stores it data consistently. I would suspect that so long as you don't make the swap on a rainy day (if you can pull that off,) you shouldn't have any problems.
The other worry I have is that if I've have both systems storing data at the same time, is Weathercat going to cope with the new Davis having data for a time period it's already got data for? Should I accepts a small gap in my data to avoid any issues (the Maplin has been providing me with gaps in my data so another, FINAL, gap won't be too depressing)
I'm not sure on this one either, but my impression is that WeatherCat only uses data from the station when it doesn't already have data for the period. Every now and then I have to take my computer down for maintenance and when WeatherCat reconnects, it download the entire contents of the data logger. However, it only changes the data that wasn't already collected. Once more you might want to check with Stu to be 100% certain.
Congrats on the new station. You'll like Davis ruggedness and accuracy.
Cheers, Edouard