Oregon Scientific WMR100 Advanced Weather Station

It’s common to see desktop weather monitors that include a thermometer and barometer and predict fine or stormy weather based on changes in air pressure.

This Oregon WMR100 Scientific weather station goes further. Although its base station has the same type of screen display, there is a lot more on it, as it connects wirelessly to two external sensors to monitor wind direction and strength as well as temperature and rainfall.

These sensors took some assembly and careful mounting, with staples and guy ropes in the case of the wind sensor. All the kit is well made with – for example, a three-piece steel pole to mount the wind monitor on and a mesh gauze to filter detritus out of captured water in the rain gauge.

The electronic set-up was made particularly easy by the automated nature of the system. The wind and rain sensors connected automatically and were calibrated with minimal intervention, though we did have to use a compass to tell the wind sensor which way north was.

The base station picks up the time from the atomic-radio clock at Cumbria and adjusts its calendar and moon phase display as soon as it gets an accurate time.

There is a mini-USB socket on the side of the base station which connects to a PC and, once you have downloaded the display software from the Oregon Scientific website, it’s possible to feed weather data through to this program for logging and display.

From a usability point of view the software is the weak link as it has a much more complicated – and rather untidy – design and little of the automated setup that was such a strong feature of the rest of the package.

The users have to determine arcane settings such as which Com port the base station is connected to (not obvious with a USB connection) and the latitude and longitude of your location, together with its height above sea level.

If you get around this lot, the software is pretty thorough. It can log readings from the weather station so you can see how weather events progress over time. It will not necessarily help with prediction, but the whole station is more about monitoring and recording than guessing tomorrow’s weather.