Davis Instruments Wireless Vantage Pro2 Plus with UV & Solar Radiation Sensors and WeatherLink Console

I always wanted a weather station. I live at altitude in Hawaii where microclimates abound. A weather nerd coworker recommended this unit. He was correct. 1. Yep, it's expensive. Quality comes at a cost. Aforementioned coworker's Davis station has been operational since 2008. Fingers crossed I experience similar longevity. 2. Instructions - they are well-written and concise. Give yourself 30 minutes to an hour to read through the documentation. There is hidden packaging/protection from shipping damage you will need to remove before installing. 3. Installation - This was easy on a 10' pole I sunk in concrete about 400' from the house/router. Important - the wind direction gauge is calibrated such that the arm it is attached to expects to point north. Use a compass or smart phone to orient it correctly. 4. The tablet data collector - this is a nice touch and fairly easy to set up. Mine wanted an immediate firmware upgrade after I connected it to my wifi network. Thereafter it will not go into sleep mode. I turned the screen as dark as possible to minimize screen burn in. Weird and hopefully the next upgrade addresses this. 5. Connecting to Weather Underground. Davis maintains their own weather data upload site, however this is mostly for agricultural users who run multiple stations. For the hobbyist, sharing to Weather Underground or similar site is likely of more interest. This required either: 1. paying Davis ~$50/year to pass the data, or purchasing an extra bit of hardware from a Weather Underground partner. I chose the former out of convenience. Summary: This experience has been enjoyable and fun to share my unusual weather (I am one of the coldest residential locations in Hawaii) with friends and the internet at large. If you are into weather this unit does it all and I love it.

Having had a Davis weather station for years, we were expecting no issues. The station base unit does have lots of great features to track and log weather data. However, the first unit would not transmit, and so we had to return it. The current unit is not consistently transmitting. We even moved it closer to the house, in hopes that it would improve. (Very disappointedly, during a rain storm -- infrequent here in the desert Southwest -- it quit transmittinng altogether, so no data.) Customer service has been the pits, with no response to emails and long wait periods on phone calls. It is rather disappointing.

Defective product, the seller did not give me the support I needed, they did not have a record of the serial number of the equipment I requested, with time in advance, the manuals did not come in the box, a bad experience and lost money.