weewx-rtldavis vs. weewx-sdr

[Wayne]

I am in the process of installing an RTL-SDR (V3) receiver on my RPi-4 with the intent of receiving weather data from my Davis Wireless Vantage Pro2 sensor suite and capturing the data in weewx. Is the "rtldavis" driver the correct one to use for this application? I see that the "sdr" driver is somewhat newer, but rtl_433 on which sdr depends does not support the Davis protocol. Is this correct or am I missing something?

Thanks.
Wayne

[Wayne]

I think I have answered my own question in that weewx-rtldavis IS the correct weewx driver for me to use. Additionally, the following install script should make the task even easier as it describes how to use an earlier golang version which builds a working rtldavis binary (the actual SDR software for the Davis protocol).

https://github.com/vinceskahan/weewx-rtldavis

My sincere thanks to Vince for the above assist. Thanks for the bandwidth...

Wayne

[WeatheredScientist]

The github link above is dead: does anyone know where to find this today?

[Vince Skahan]

Moved a few months ago to https://github.com/weewx-contrib/weewx-rtldavis

[WeatheredScientist]

I feel like I am getting close but not quite seeing the big picture. I'm able to see the transmitter, but am having trouble decoding its output, let alone parsing it into a database file of some kind. Github is not my strength, but I am willing to learn. What's the best way for me to pick up what I need to know without being too much of a pain on other community members?

[Vince Skahan]

Well not being clairvoyant it is impossible in the absence of any information for anyone to guess what you actually installed, nor how, nor what you see... so it is equally impossible for anybody to help.

I would suggest you start with https://www.ministryoftesting.com/articles/11b82aee?s_id=15060040 as a random ‘how to report an issue’ howto…

[WeatheredScientist]

I am trying to get weewx 5.3.1 up and running on my mac. I am not super fluent with github and the like so it is difficult for me to parse my struggles into language that is more easily understood by people well-versed. I haven't had a real reason to work in a terminal setting in over 25 years minus some cmd line programming in an environment that no one here has heard of (shout out to any scientists who have used Igor Pro!), so it is not something I do for my job or hobby. But I am not unfamiliar with terminals.

I am using a Davis 6263 system, which means the full set ISS plus their dinky ecosystem-locked console. I hate the console. I want to bypass it so i can have my data. to do that i need to intercept the RF signal. I have an RTL-SDR v3 dongle and a 915MHz antenna to do that. I will need to frequency hop around that center freq b/c I'm in the US and Davis likes to be difficult.

The idea is to run weewx in a container on my NAS. But I am setting that aside. Right now, I am just trying to get it running at all on this macbook, which has the nice terminal vs Windows where everything is a problem. Plus I can move right under the ISS to eliminate SNR as a root cause.

So far, I have realized I need weewx to read in data from a .json file that rtldavis will generate. The problem I have is getting rtldavis to actually spit out anything meaningful. I am just seeing a bunch of simualtor data.

I don't really know where else to start: it's a bit of unknowns unknowns for me.

[Tom Hogland]

The simplest way might be to look at either an older console or a Weather Envoy, and add a Datalogger to whichever one you get. That handles everything for you and feeds out a stream of packets that Weewx can understand. Both are available on eBay for fairly reasonable prices.

[Vince Skahan]

You're trying to blaze a new trail here in so many ways it's hard to even list them.  Mac for starters.  The new Davis console for a bigger hurdle.

The longstanding weewx-rtldavis driver is the only known somewhat straightforward solution that handles the frequency hopping and is known to work ok for US users, although it is (as far as I know) raspberry pi only. At this time a raspi is unfortunately absurdly expensive even for used ones on eBay.  Maybe you know somebody with an extra pi4 you can borrow.  If you can find one you'd be up in an hour or two max.

Perhaps you could query Davis servers for 'your' data and get there the long way, but I don't know.  I avoid those kinds of kludges.  Glad I have an ancient VP2 with the old console and serial dataloader directly attached to my raspi.

Another way to toss hardware at the problem the meteobridge pro2 for $500 but you'd still need to figure out how to integrate that with weewx. The meteobridge documentation is so skeletal I can't even guess at how to do so, but I'm guessing some folks might have thoughts.  In an ideal world you would have that emit MQTT which weewx can subscribe to, but I can't see mention of MQTT in the (to me, awful) documentation online for anything meteobridge.

A $500 box that is limited to me is lunacy if you can throw $150 at the problem even if a pi is crazy expensive these days, but some folks just spend the money.

[WeatheredScientist]

@Tom, yes, I have thought of that. Envoys are surprisingly pricey on eBay presently, but I am watching. Not sure what is going on there.
The old console is a less elegant alternative I've also considered.
What would make this super nice is if Davis just let us output from the WLL console, instead of trying to force us into a subscription model that still doesn't offer what I want: local logging at 2.5s refresh, plus upload to services of my choice at my desired refresh rate (or theirs), not Davis's.
But I like the challenge of the RF dongle for now. The data is there in the air, just waiting to be plucked, if you can follow it and read it.

@Vince, I'll keep it here. I found your github repo:
https://github.com/weewx-contrib/weewx-rtldavis

I can't seem to perform the optional step, it seems to not find a resource:

% wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/weewx-contrib/weewx-rtldavis/refs/heads/main/weewx-pipinstall/install-v5pip.sh
--2026-05-18 16:13:23-- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/weewx-contrib/weewx-rtldavis/refs/heads/main/weewx-pipinstall/install-v5pip.sh
Resolving raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)... 185.199.108.133, 185.199.110.133, 185.199.111.133, ...
Connecting to raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)|185.199.108.133|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2026-05-18 16:13:24 ERROR 404: Not Found.

[Vince Skahan]

hmmm -  it was right there in front of you if you looked at the list of files there you could have downloaded manually, but I did have a bad wget command.  Fixed now (I think).

Reminder - that script won't run as written on a Mac or non-debian(ish) linux so I don't know how applicable it is for you specifically, but it does work fine on a pi or debian/ubuntu box and with a little tweaking has pieces applicable to non-debian(ish) linux os.

[weather list]

Meteobridge: The MB Nano (SD) is a bit costly but plugs right into the old VP2 data socket and is easy to set up, and works fine with WeeWx, plus it has pre-fab direct upload setups for nearly all the weather sites, and a whole series of its own configurable internal reports too, if you have the patience. I guess if you have the new Davis console it would not help.

I've been using two of them for years.

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[WeatheredScientist]

Yes, your advice is spot on: apt-get was throwing me for a loop. But I did get it working! Wunderground is updating live.

I am now going to see about getting this to work on a PC (better b/c mine is always on and awake), and eventually in a docker container on my NAS.