Dear Blick, Felix, Herb, and WeatherCat Davis troubleshooters,
Last night just before I was about to retire for the usual dose of
Boob Tube . . . . .
My darn Weather Envoy lost its connection once more. However, this time I caught it almost immediately after it started.
Using my new trick, I switched the ID to something other than the retransmission ID I'm using and put it immediately back. Within a minute, the communications was working once more.
That seems to rule out an outside source of interference. If it was something external, it stopped almost as fast as it started since I caught almost as soon as it started. That make me think about what Herb said with respect to the Davis IDs:
So my guess: the individual channels are probably mapped digitally onto the same frequency using Davis's proprietary communications protocol.
Because I had so much trouble in the past, I had done something that perhaps was the cause of my problems rather than a solution. I broadcast from the ISS on ID #2. Then I rebroadcast that information from the console to the Weather Envoy on #3. In principle, there should be no need for this rebroadcasting, the ISS is close enough to the Envoy so that I should be able to pick up the signal directly without the "boost."
At the time, I didn't see any harm because by rebroadcasting I thought I was only making sure the signal was good and strong. However, Davis may not expect to have the original signal (on #2) and the rebroadcast signal (on #3) arriving at a receiver at comparable strength. Normally, Davis data is always different, and their technique to determine signal and reject noise may rely on that. If the signal on #2 and #3 are the same, could this cause the Envoy to effectively
"become confused?"It is easy enough to check this hypothesis out. I turned off retransmiting on the console and I am using ID #2 only, so that both the console and the Envoy get their data directly from the ISS alone - no potential interference.
So far so good . . . .
Stay tuned . . . .
Cheers, Edouard