Dissappointing (Oregon Scientific WMR200 Advanced Professional)

Member Name: TonyS

Product:	Oregon Scientific WMR200 Advanced Professional
Date:	31/01/09 (278 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: RF sensors, Solar panel, logging, big display with lots of info

Disadvantages: You still need dry cell barreries and the logging download doesn't work

Overall I am not impressed with this unit. Generally it seems to work, but I bought it for its logging ability, which I have not yet been able to download to a PC. Many others seem to have the same problem. Oregon do not own or pay for the software, its written by some guy for free, and the forum keeps recommending to upgrade to the latest full version which only has a 30 day free trial. There are old posts shows the same thing every year as 'there has been allot of work done on WMR200 communication recently'. It doesn't work either and looks particularly unprofessional with 1 million settings, lots of features, and incomprehensible menus and icons. Nowhere can you find a 'communicate with station' or 'download data' menu.

The display is large, but very confusing to use. It has touch screen and touching it makes things happen, unfortunately the numbers don't make allot of sense in some cases. Rain fall can be 0 in last 24hrs but show a figure for now. The forecast changes to night at fixed time even though its blaring sunshine outside.

My outside sensor shows 90%+ humidity all the time and is clearly wrong. Overall I thought the sensors where more inaccurate than my other equipment. The rain gauge trend graph shows 1 or 2 bars at maximum even when bucketing down, it seems to be scaled incorrectly.

There is a solar panel, but this only powers the outside Temp/humidity and the wind sensor. You still have to provide dry cells that need to be changed occasionally, rechargeables will not be charged by the panel, and it is probably too small anyway. This defeats the purpose of having the panel, so that you can avoid having to change batteries, when its up on the roof.

Unfortunately this is a complicated product that does not seem to be finished, and does not have (working) supporting software supplied.

Summary: Poor value, not finished