PoE and Data instead of PBA

I have two Tempest weather stations. While I have issues with them, overall I still like them.

Just this week I am experiencing slower wind sampling for the first time that I know of. After some research, I found that it was due to low power from the battery. I discovered the PBA on the Weatherflow website and it intrigued me. I am going to check what history I have to determine if this problem is chronic or not and if it is, I’ll likely buy a PBA.

While looking at the features and specs on the PBA, I saw that the power cable uses RJ45. I thought immediately of PoE and, while we’re at it, use it to pipe data up and down. The data rate problem would be gone. I realize that the point of the Tempest is that it is wireless, but you are already connecting what is essentially an ethernet cable, so why not take advantage of it? With the right hardware/software support, any or all sample rates could be increased up to the capability of the hardware.

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Powering the ‘sensor’ and PBA is different than powering the required ‘hub’ that sensor talks to. The actual ‘smarts’ are in the hub firmware. The sensor just talks RF to the hub.

Now if you want the hub to have wired ethernet, that’s been asked for many times for many years and it seems that is just not going to happen. Same with supporting more than 2.4GHz wifi on the hub. People have asked and asked since day one.