Brunton ADC-PRO

For instance, I bought this Brunton ADC-PRO after selling my old camera. It’s sort of like a personal weather station with thermometer, barometer, hydrometer (humidity), wind speed, altitude and various other features I’ll never use. As it turns out, I’ll hardly use it anyway, because it sucks.

Another piece of gear I own is a Davis Vantage Pro2 scientific-quality weather instrument package and wireless remote display. I use this thing everyday, mostly to watch the weather, another of my bulwarks against any consciousness of my loserdom (although it sure makes everyone else aware of it.)

Anyway, there is little correspondence between what my Davis and my Brunton are telling me about the atmosphere, even when they are measuring the same air. The Brunton reads consistently lower temperature, higher humidity, and it can’t measure sea-level corrected pressure as I live at a higher altitude than it can adjust to. This would be understandable if I lived at 23,000 ft., but you’d expect the thing to be able to handle an adjustment to just under 7,000 ft. This thing doesn’t.

It does have a handy ski run counter based on the altimeter that I may use this winter, but I wouldn’t trust this thing to be right about conditions any more than G.W. Bush knows what’s going on in his own war. Maybe that’s the whole problem, the Army has been attempting to predict the weather in Iraq with useless gadgets like the Brunton ADC-Pro.