Davis Instruments
Hayward, California — the company that sells both a plastic sextant and a professional weather station, which tells you exactly what kind of company it is.
Davis Instruments began as a small marine-products company — its early signature item a lightweight plastic sextant — and grew into one of the serious names in personal and professional weather monitoring. Vantage Pro2 stations sit on farms, fire departments, research sites and a great many roofs. It still sells the sextant. That combination is the page: a company that measures the sky with radios and the sky with a mirror and an arc, and treats both as legitimate. Since 2019 it has been part of AEM, an environmental-monitoring group, after a private-equity acquisition.
- 1969Jim Acquistapace and Bob Selig buy the small marine-products company, per Davis
- 2019Acquired via Union Park Capital; now part of AEM's monitoring group
- 500K+Weather stations sold, per Davis's own figures
What we'd reach for
- Vantage Pro2The serious personal weather station — the one that shows up in research and agriculture, not just on hobbyist maps.
- Vantage VueThe compact all-in-one, for people who want data without a project.
- WeatherLinkThe console, app and data layer — check what's free and what isn't before you build a habit on it.
- Mark 3 and Mark 15 sextantsPlastic, affordable, and genuinely usable — the reason celestial navigation is still teachable.
- EnviroMonitorThe agricultural sensing system — field data at farm scale.
- AirLinkAir-quality monitoring, the newer end of the same instinct.
- Marine accessoriesThe original business — clocks, barometers, tools and the small nautical hardware Davis never dropped.
There is something clarifying about a company that will sell you a plastic sextant and a professional-grade weather station out of the same catalog. Davis Instruments of Hayward, California has done exactly that for decades, and neither product is a novelty.
The company started in small marine products — the lightweight sextant was an early signature — and grew into one of the names that matters in weather monitoring. Vantage Pro2 stations sit on farms, at fire departments, on research sites and on a great many roofs belonging to people who simply want to know what the wind is actually doing at their house rather than at the airport twelve miles away.
Its own history is slightly fuzzy at the start, and we’ll leave it that way: one source gives 1963, while Davis’s own anniversary story says Jim Acquistapace and Bob Selig bought the little marine-products company in 1969. A purchase is not a founding, nobody reconciles the two, and this page doesn’t guess — the same call CMI’s tangled dates got.
Two instruments, one instinct
The weather side is the business now: Vantage Pro2 and the compact Vantage Vue, the WeatherLink console and app layer, EnviroMonitor for agriculture, AirLink for air quality. Davis says half a million stations have gone out the door and that a Vantage Pro2 has recorded a 199 mph gust — their figures, and good ones.
Two honest notes before you buy in. A personal weather station is instrumentation, not a forecast: it tells you what is happening at your sensor, which is genuinely useful and completely different from an official forecast product, and siting the sensors badly will give you confident wrong data the same way a badly mounted compass will. And check what the data layer costs — cloud tiers and app features change, and this site has made the subscription point often enough (inReach, satellite PTT, and Victron’s notable lack of one) to make it here too.
The sextant side is the one we find hard not to admire. A Davis plastic sextant is affordable enough that celestial navigation remains something a person can actually learn rather than read about, and precise enough to get a usable fix from someone who has practiced. It is also, unambiguously, a backup and training instrument — it does not make you a navigator, and the skill decays without use. We could not confirm which specific models are in current production versus catalog carryover, so check before setting your heart on one.
Owned by a monitoring group since 2019
Davis was acquired through Union Park Capital in August 2019 and now sits within AEM, a family of environmental-monitoring brands. That’s the normal shape of things in this catalog — see Pelican, Silva, Bushnell — and it’s worth knowing mostly because platform ownership tends to sharpen the professional lines and thin the quirky ones. The sextant is the quirky one.
Where Davis Instruments fits
Anyone who wants real weather data at their own location. Vantage Pro2 for the serious version, Vantage Vue for the simple one.
Farms, sites and remote properties. EnviroMonitor and the sensor range, where knowing the microclimate has money attached.
Sailors learning celestial. The most accessible sextant in the world, plus the marine tools the company never abandoned.
Not for: anyone who needs certified meteorological instrumentation for regulatory work — that is a different tier of equipment. Not for a buyer who wants a sextant as a decoration; buy a nicer-looking one and don’t pretend.
Why we rate them
It kept the strange product. A company that still sells sextants in 2026 is telling you something about what it values.
The weather line is genuinely professional. Half a million stations, and they show up where accuracy has consequences.
Made and tested where the company lives. Designed, assembled and tested at Hayward, per Davis — a specific claim, in a catalog full of vague ones.
When you want to know what the sky is doing — with a radio or with a mirror and an arc — we reach for Davis.