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Thread: Weather station data consumption/upload query

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    Default Weather station data consumption/upload query

    Evening all,

    My parents are looking at getting a wireless weather station, probably an oregon wmr 200/300, and are looking at uploading to weather underground so when they are absent from the farm they can still get a rough idea of what the weather/rainfall is doing.

    Now they are only on pre paid telstra 3g/4g broad band as they cant get adsl, and to get fixed wireless broadband nbn is a waste of money for them, they use bugger all data a month (emails bit of online banking and Anti virus updates etc) and are on prepaid but may be converting over to a data share sim in the near future as its now better bang for buck than when they did their last mobile contracts, they dont have smart phones, only basic 3g phones.

    They may be getting upwards of 10gig/mth (2 phones/5gig each) depending on what plan they go on to, so the question is...

    How much data is the weather station/weather data uploading likely to use based on a set upload interval, ie once every 5 seconds/1min/5mins etc, ive done a bit of research and the best i can find is about 30mb/day weather station only, which in a 10gig/mth data pool is bugger all.

    what are other peoples experiences with this data consumption wise?

    thank Hans
    Last edited by Lazyone; 08-07-17 at 07:40 PM. Reason: missing word



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    I would think 30mb/day could be a bit high.

    I don't upload weather, but I do upload aircraft tracking data and that only uses around 5mb per week, if that's any indication.

    Obviously others who are doing the same thing with weather stations should be able to give you are better indication.

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    I would have said 30mb per day is quite high too but it probably depends on what data is being sent. Looking at their upload protocol, it is using a http GET so in excess of 100kb per transaction might not be unreasonable. I'm not sure about the Oregon station, but you should be able to tailor the data sent and frequency if needed. I would say a 5 minute update would be sufficient.

    The worse thing about mobile broadband is the minimum data per connection. I had a device that used used to sent only a few kb's every 15 minutes and could not work out why the data usage was so high. Ended up being the modem device Telstra gave me had a 15 minute timeout, and my device was actually sending packets at about every 15.5 minutes and as such was being charged at 1mb each time (the minimum data charge, which works out to be just under 3GB per month!!) A quick change to a more frequent data packet reduced the monthly usage to to around about 20mb per month! I've since changed those devices to a M2M supplier who only charge a minimum of 1kb - I digress...

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    For a guide, read the replies to the first link (wxforum) returned from the search, .

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    Quote Originally Posted by tristen View Post
    For a guide, read the replies to the first link (wxforum) returned from the search, .
    thats one of the links i got my "approximate" consumption figures from, given its a few years old now im expecting with newer stations and sensors out there the amount of data will also increase

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