As soon as I bought an electronic weather station 18 years ago, I wanted to see the data from my station, and stations around the world, online. It started small, and if you're interested in the history you can read my history of internet-enabled weather stations below. Recently, there's been a breakthrough that I thought warranted a review. This is the AmbientWeather WeatherBridge. Here's what's in the box:

The WeatherBridge setup (manual available online) is rather ingenious. It combines a TP Link portable router (normally used to share a laptop's Wifi or cell data connection) with a USB hub that connects to the (in my case) Davis WeatherLink USB device connected to a Davis Vantage Vue weather station (the standard in consumer weather stations). It also works with the full-featured AcuRite weather stations, as well as stations from other vendors.

WeatherBridge allows the convenience of an IP device with cloud archiving (so you don't have to have your weather station connected to a desktop computer 24/7), plus wireless functionality (now your weather station and router don't have to be in the same room!)

The main advantage of the WeatherBridge versus previous devices such as WeatherLinkIP (which I reviewed several years ago) is that you get much more frequent updates sent through to your weather servers -- as fast as every 5 seconds with archived data on some sites. The WeatherLinkIP device, on the other hand, only updates once per minute to the WeatherLink.com site, with no archive, and every 20 minutes to CWOP, which is not enough to catch the highest wind speeds and most extreme temperatures.

Once I had it up and running, I placed it temporarily on a tripod next to my dying Davis Vantage Pro station in my backyard. Here's a link to its 1-minute data on PWSWeather.com.

The WeatherBrudge also supports AirCam, PWSWeather, Twitter, mySQL, email, HTTP commands and connection to Ambient's Virtual Weather Station software, which can be used to upload graphs and data to your website, among other things.

You do want to follow the manual closely when setting this up, because it does require a little networking knowledge (for example, after you use the included website to find the device, you'll probably want to set it to use a Static IP Address for convenience, in case you need to quickly come back to the WeatherBridge's internal web page for configuring). One thing that temporarily confused me: the USB hub is needed for Davis, and most other weather stations. I'd advise using it by default and taking it out of the equation if you need to.

HISTORY OF INTERNET-CONNECTED ELECTRONIC WEATHER STATIONS:

In 1997, I used a screen-capture program on my Windows 3.1 computer to capture the software display from my Radio Shack WX-200 weather station and upload it to my website. Then in the year 2000, Windows 98 was rocking as I installed AmbientWeather's revolutionary software "Virtual Weather Station." Then I had access to all sorts of graphs and data, uploading to the Internet, as well as fledgling weather networks like WeatherForYou.

The next reasonable step was to turn the weather station into an Internet Appliance -- to remove the computer from the equation. This was accomplished in 2007 by the WeatherLinkIP device, which still allowed you to use a computer to archive precise data if you chose. The same year, a similar device, the HauteSpot, came out of Europe and promised WiFi transmission of weather data from a station -- but was extremely expensive and ultimately failed to deliver (mine literally went up in smoke).

DISCLAIMER: This is not an official endorsement from AccuWeather, Inc. Product was supplied by a vendor for this review.

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