I have a Davis Vantage Pro 2 reporting to WU through WD. Is it possible to also report to ambientweather.net through WD?
Looks like you have to get their WeatherBridge to be able to upload with a Davis.
Uploading to Ambientweather.net is very much like being able to upload to Davis’ Weatherlink.com or Acurite’s myAcurite.com. These are all services that do not make financial gains from the users uploading data there as they don’t resell the data. The service purely exists to service their customers.
As such uploading to Ambientweather.net requires that you purchase one of their stations. Ambient doesn’t only sell Fine Offset clones. They sell some other Chinese stuff (non-Fine Offset) and they sell Davis stations. As mentioned to upload to Ambientweather.net if you are a Davis owner you need to purchase a WeatherBridge from them which has the necessary license to upload to their service. Part of the cost associated with the purchase of the WeatherBridge goes to the maintenance of the service. You wouldn’t expect for a Fine Offset station to be able to upload to WeatherLink.com. Well the same is true in this case.
The WeatherBridge is just a Meteobridge by another name. But it has been modified to include the Ambient license. The good news is that anyone with a Meteobridge can pay the $100 license fee and enable any Meteobridge to upload to Ambientweather.net. This way Ambient gets their cut and make the sale and thus allows you to become their customer and you then gain the means to be able to upload to Ambientweather.net. Wouldn’t it be neat if Davis had a way to allow their WeatherLink Live device to interface with say a Fine Offset clone and then let you upload to Weatherlink.com? Here Ambient is going above and beyond what Davis and Acurite are doing with the private online service that is only meant for their customers.
The only way that Weather-Display could upload to Ambientweather is if they formed a parnership with Ambient and devised a way to collect this $100 licensing fee. But I’m not sure that they would be interested as they already have what they need via the partnership with Meteobridge.
I don’t think this needs to come down to a Meteobridge vs Weather-Display argument. The two are very different and they both bring different things as part of how they work. Weather-Display is superior in having a local interface with your data. The Meteobridge is more of a utility to upload data to many places. And if you are a Davis user and you have a WeatherLink Live then you can have both a Meteobridge and Weather-Display at your disposal simultaneously.
Thank you for the thorough reply. I was unaware that ambientweather.net exists only as a benefit for their users.