Connectivity: While Reddit posts and user reviews made it pretty clear to us that wireless weather stations can be unreliable, none of the people we interviewed wanted to deal with the hassle of wires.

The Davis combination is a couple hundred dollars more than our top pick and its sensors, but in terms of precision and build quality, we don’t think you’ll find a more reliable solution unless you’re willing to spend hundreds more. You’ll need to add the WeatherLinkIP if you want to log your weather data online or connect with Weather Underground’s Personal Weather Station Network, a manufacturer-agnostic online portal that allows you to upload data from your own station and use the data from others’ stations. And on heavy rain days, it was the only station that perfectly matched our physical rainfall measurements. The Vantage Vue system has superior build quality and extra sensitivity that lets it capture slighter, briefer wind gusts, which in our testing other stations missed.

If your interest in the weather goes past enthusiasm and into full nerd territory, if you rely on accurate weather data for your livelihood, or if long-term durability is your primary concern, Davis Instruments’s Vantage Vue, together with the WeatherLinkIP data logger and software system, is worth the extra expense.

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