Sensors that survive a full season outdoors

A tipping-bucket rain gauge blocks with leaves and a cup anemometer wears its bearings out. The S700 removes both failure modes: rainfall is read by radar and there is nothing that spins, so a season of dust, insects and frost does not gradually degrade the measurement.

The pyranometer matters more than it looks. Global solar radiation is what drives the reference evapotranspiration ET₀, and ET₀ is what turns rainfall into an actual water balance, how much of what fell is still available to the crop.

The S2120 joins the network on its own, no logger in between, and reports the eight parameters directly over LoRaWAN. That makes it easy to add a second or third measurement point once the first one shows how much plots differ from each other.

It has the classic mechanical rain and wind assembly, so it needs a yearly clean. In exchange, it costs a fraction of a professional station and reads UV, which the S700 does not.

Two measurements, but the two that most agronomic reasoning depends on. Temperature and humidity give you the dew point and the vapour pressure deficit, and from there the leaf-wetness hours and the transpiration stress.

Because it is cheap and battery-powered, this is the sensor you scatter. Three S2101 units on a slope tell you where frost actually settles far better than one station at the top of the plot.

Soil moisture is what decides irrigation, and it is the one quantity no forecast can give you. Buried in the active root layer, the probe shows when the reserve drops below the management point, the moment worth watering, rather than a date on a calendar.

Soil temperature governs germination and root activity; electrical conductivity tracks salinity, which is where over-fertilisation and poor water quality first become visible.