Weather Instruments

Review by L. Belfiore:

I bought this just to have something cool on my desk, and I love it! It looks great on the corner of my desk, and reminds me of the little bubbling lites that used to be on my Christmas tree when I was a kid.

I only gave it four stars because it’s obviously not 100% accurate, and the barometer is a little hard to fill. It comes with a syringe and tube to fill it, but the tube takes awhile to thread into the barometer. It also takes three syringes full to get the barometer to a good level.

Amazon doesn’t give measurements, but the base is about 8″ wide, the Galileo thermometer is about 8″ high as well, and the glass water barometer is almost 7″ high.

Review by Joanne M. Garcia:

I bought this as a birthday present for my fiance and he LOVES it. It looks great on a bookshelf or desk, and is a great conversation starter. I didn’t have any problems filling the barometer (instead of taking the tube out of the barometer to refill, simply take the syringe off the end of the tube). Overall it is a great product, and a very cool design!

Review by Francois Rouaix:

I bought this station about 6 months ago. It was very easy to set up, and has been working perfectly ever since. Having one reliable atomic clock in the house is useful, as all appliances drift somewhat, and so do mechanical watches. The wireless remote temperature sensor has also been working reliably. I just placed in under a bench on the deck, and it has survived so far (in the wet Seattle climate).

Also, the station has a memory for highest/lowest temperatures (one for the station, one for the remote sensor), which is nice when you want to know exactly how hot/cold it got last night.

I haven’t been using the weather forecast much, so I won’t comment on it.

I still haven’t had to change the batteries (almost 6 months of use by now).

Altogether, I’m very happy with the purchase (less than ), and would recommend this unit to anyone looking for an inexpensive atomic clock/temperature sensor combo.

Review by Clueman13:

Purchased weather station from Amazon and is working fine. Here are some possibly useful tips for initial setup and operation. Pay attention to battery installation in the temperature sensor first, then the station second. For an initial test, leave the sensor and station in the same room to stabilize and monitor both temperatures for about 1 hour. Over that time, I observed mostly 0.5 degree difference in the two readings. This test checks normal operation and in my case the comparison was remarkably good.

My outside sensor is in a sheltered location and less than thirty feet from the station. The manual says up to 80 feet separation, but this is highly depended on the number of walls/floors and construction materials in the way. That is, don’t count on the 80 foot separation distance.

Regular alkaline batteries for the station are fine. However, care must be exercised in sensor battery selection especially if you live in a cold winter area such as New England. Regular 1.5 volt alkaline or enhanced alkaline type batteries are not suited for prolonged cold outdoor use. However, definitely consider the newer 1.5 volt Lithium batteries that operate down to minus 40 degrees F for prolonged cold outdoor use. The only drawback is cost, but they are often on sale at national drug chains.

Getting the radio controlled time clock to operate properly can be tricky. Based on experience with other clocks, my best reception occurs with (1) location on the second floor (height), (2) display facing east/west (antenna direction) rather than north or south, and (3) location away from a TV, radio, or stereo (interference). Thunderstorms tend to disrupt sensor to station communication but operation eventually returns to normal. Station weather indicator is no worse than the New England weather forecasters.

Review by Forrest Milder:

Pro: many, many American locations and international cities, weather is frequently updated, very good-looking display, worked much better than other similar products

Con: Installation Software didn’t come up automatically (but very easily remedied; rest of installation was very easy, and the software worked great after that)

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The Weather Fxi comes in shrink wrap packaging. You cut it out of the box. There’s a receiver with the screen that you see in Amazon’s listing, a transmitter that plugs into a USB port on your computer, and a CD. There are instructions, but you barely need to read them.

You put the CD in your computer’s drive. This was the only weakness of the whole package — my CD drive did not automatically load the program. I had to go to explorer and click on the startup program manually. It was very obvious, and it took me under 15 seconds, but some people might be a bit stalled by this. If you were expecting the program to just pop up on the screen (or if you didn’t know how to start a program by using Window’s explorer –that would be right click on the start button, and then scroll till you find your CD drive, and then double click on the startup program that you’ll find on that drive), then I suppose you might not be able to get this to work. I do not consider this the least bit difficult; it takes 15 seconds, tops, and most everyone I know is familiar with finding programs on their disk drive, and double clicking on them.

Anyway, you then plug in the transmitter to a USB port on the computer. Finally, you pick five locales to monitor. There are a LOT of cities — my Boston suburb is on there, with a population of 30,000, as was my mother’s suburb of NYC, also about the same size. My mother in law and daughter, who live in their respective cities were also there; there wasn’t a way (that I saw, anyway) to further define their location, but I think that should be suficient anyway. Finally, for my son, I selected Munich, Germany. The selection process takes about 3 or 4 minutes. You have to wait for 30 seconds or so after each selection for the software to think before you can move on to the next city.

That’s it. We’ve had it for several days now, and it constantly updates, all by itself. The display screen is really good looking and detailed. There are at least 15 or 20 different symbols for the weather (clouds, rain, snow, sun, partial sun, etc.), a written statement (like “becoming cloudy and cold”, the temperature, high and low, wind, precipitation, humidity, what temperature it “really” feels like, as well as the predictions or the next several days. You can press a button on one side and instead of three days forecasts, it will give you morning noon and night for today, or days four through six. You press a button on the other side, and it scrolls through complete data for the other 4 cities. If you plug it in, it stays back-lit (it runs on batteries, too, but we haven’t tried that). It’s extrememly easy to read. One last thing — the screen changes colors depending on what band of 10 degrees the temperature is — my wife loves that.

So, the bottom line is that it took less than 10 minutes to set up, it takes no maintenance whatsoever, it displays international locations (very few do), and it is very sharp looking.

VERY highly recommended.

Review by Steve Lovelady:

I am unhappy with this product. Setup was a breeze but does not update often. This product gets it’s information from Accuweather, but fails to match what the web site is displaying. Currently it is showing partly sunny and it is 9pm. Also the wind speed has been at 7 mph for three days. Bushnell 7 Day Weather Fxi Station

Review by CQ DX:

Actually, I picked this unit up new at Lowe’s for forty bills. It works very well, and is very easy to set up and use. I own four weather stations (i’m a gadget nut), and this one was the easiest to use by far. The LCD display panel is nice and big, so consequently the sizeable numbers are easy on the eyesight. Accuracy is on par with one of my more expensive, ‘higher end’ LaCrosse Technology weather units, which is reassuring. For accuracy, my remote outdoor sensor unit is placed on an outdoor bedroom window sill between the screen and window on a shady side of the house. This way, there is enough outdoor air circulating around the sensor unit to help insure accuracy. Also, I really like the fact that the unit also constantly displays minimum and maximum temperatures for the day right next to the current indoor and outdoor temps. The packaging and instruction manual were also top-notch. Nice graphics on the box, and no twist ties to undo, or blister packs to rip open. Just unscrew the 2 plastic holders on the back of the box, and tear aside the cardboard surrounding the unit encased in easy to remove plastic. Ingenious, and convenient for the consumer- more companies should package like ‘Acu-Rite’! I highly recommend this weather unit, and feel it is one of the best ‘bang per buck’ units available for the price I got it for.

Review by NewsView:

As a weather-watching nut, I have come to own a number of forecast stations over the years, including the venerated but seemingly over-hyped Davis Vantage Pro2, two LaCrosse models and a cordless phone/weather forecaster manufactured by Uniden. All of them have their strengths, but most of them under deliver in the forecasting department. For a much more competitive price, and a much easier ability to read at a distance —- making this model useful as a wall clock and calendar —- the Acu-Rite 75077 blows them away. It’s not that it offers a lot of weather station features. It doesn’t measure rain or wind. It doesn’t offer a software download option, and it doesn’t graph or store weather trends. It doesn’t even measure indoor or outdoor humidity. But it does well at what it is designed to do: featuring a jumbo-sized display of the time, date, indoor and outdoor temperature, including the day’s high and low temps — all of which it has more or less reliably done around the clock for approximately two years now.

How does this home weather station hold its own in comparison to those costing significantly more? Because this particular model, contrary to others I have seen, including other types manufactured by Acu-Rite, takes a full two weeks to calibrate itself. While in learning mode, the date and time functions work, but for the 12-24 barometric forecast. Patience is a worthwhile tradeoff, however, in exchange for improved forecasting accuracy. The result is that the barometer readings only trigger a change in the prediction icon when the weather actually shifts. This is in sharp contrast to most units in this price range that are far too changeable, often thrown off simply by normal barometric shifts associated with the rising or setting sun. On the flip side, the pricey Davis Weather Instruments model I own will flash changes of forecast only briefly before reverting to a perpetual Partly Cloudy forecasting icon here in sunny SoCal — which means they are far too easy to miss. Not so, the Acu-Rite 75077. This unit consistently predicts weather 12-24 hours in advance that is in synch 8 out of 10 times with local weather reports, and it keeps displaying the icon long enough to appreciate what type of whether is anticipated. In addition, it offers a wide variety of forecast icons. A cloudy or partly sunny icon can also include graphics representing rain showers or high clouds. It can add in a designation regarding snow/ice, or as is more typical in my climate, animated sprinkles (flashing slash marks indicating scattered showers). A few weeks ago an unfamiliar one popped up, which apparently referred to an unusually heavy fog that rolled in a day later. The only downside to all these icons is that the documentation that came with the unit is so sparse that interpreting what all the incremental changes in the graphics mean can be tricky at first. On the up side, you don’t really need a lot of documentation to get this set up and running. The AA batteries go in the sensor first and immediately thereafter you load the batteries into the main unit. Moreover, the batteries seem to last forever — in the moderate climate where I reside, anyhow.

Now for the negatives: Like certain LaCrosse units that seem to be prone to outages, the Acu-Rite is prone to losing sensor contact from time to time. No worries. Within an hour or so contact is reestablished. Another problem: Although the atomic clock worked in the location where it was set, it can take a couple of days to “catch” the atomic clock radio signal on subsequent DST shifts (depending on atmospheric/weather conditions). I have seen LaCrosse atomic clocks struggle to synchronize in a similar fashion, and in some cases no amount of reorienting near a window facing Colorado, which is where the radio signal originates, works. Because I have had much experience with atomic clocks, however, I have come to conclude that this is just one of the hassles associated with owning them. They do eventually catch, but sometimes it takes days or temporary relocation of the unit to do so successfully. Rather than do that, it is often easier to manually set the clock to what appears to be the correct time and then let it correct any minor inaccuracies on its own once the atomic signal reception improves. (TIP: I recommend letting the unit self-set the clock at least once after purchase to confirm that the atomic clock circuitry is working while the manufacturer warranty still applies.)

Bottom line? This is a fantastic value. Most weather station buyers aren’t about to drop a hundred or more dollars on the so-called professional units, designated as such essentially because they collect rain and wind data. For those who are not interested in measuring those values — or going to the hassle of connecting those added sensors up outdoors — this weather station will serve just about anyone’s needs and do it better than units costing significantly more. I hope that the Acu-Rite company continues to offer the Acu-Rite 75077, and to produce more models containing their patented 14-day intelligent learning technology.

Review by James C. Lang:

This is everything it was supposed to be and a little more. We are windmill/wind generator retailers and installers. The system also comes with a program for determining the amount of wind passing over the system. Very useful for determining the feasibility of a wind project. The wireless setup program worked fine. The standard graph system is a bit simple as there are no numbers on the axis to figure our what the graphing represents but not bad for a simple system, all information is available on the computer program. Which by the way, I think should be included with the original purchase because of the nondescript graphing on the system. However, we have very definite needs that may not be applicable to other users.

Review by Larry F. Nelson:

The Davis Vantage Vue Weather Station is a new model from this U.S. company that builds high-end stations. The Vantage Vue is the low end of their products, but is still far above the competition in quality and features. I bought this one to replace another weather station that, although I’ve had it for several years, had never been very satisfactory. When the wind gauge worked, the rain gauge wouldn’t. The wireless transmitter wouldn’t send signals through an exterior wall to the console, so I had to hard-wire them together. The software connection in my computer was a poor database.

When I got a new computer, I no longer had the required serial port for the old station, and since the anemometer, wind-direction and rain gauge had long since quit working, it was time to replace it with a better system.

The vantage Vue checks wind velocity and direction, temperature, rain-fall, humidity and barometric pressure like most weather stations. This one also calculates wind chill, heat index, heating and cooling degree-days, moon phase, 12-hour forecast, and several other functions, and displays them on an easy-to-read display. It works wirelessly so well, that I tested it by carrying the console 100 yards from the house and could still easily get transmissions from the sensor suite. The Station comes with well-written manuals that are easy to understand. Installation was pretty simple and without any complications. I highly recommend this unit for serious weather-watchers.

Review by Marvin May:

This item functions as intended, but I don’t understand the graph portion of the display.

Some things I dislike about this product are:

1. The backlight only dims, it cannot be turned off.

2.The digital clock takes up too much space on the display. I would make it smaller or eliminate it altogether, and make the weather portion of the display larger.

3. The button that allows the viewer to view temperature highs & lows etc only lasts for 5 seconds. I would extend this viewing time.

4. The weather icon (forcaster) does not even remotely predict the real weather.

In spite of these drawbacks I would recommend this product.

Marvin J May