We are now shipping Water/Soil-Moisture Sensors with new firmware 2.5 which contains following significant improvements over previous versions:

• A new option "transmit multiple data points at a time" can be enabled at associate time or at "Special Options." When enabled, for example if you set logging interval to every 30 seconds, temperature and soil-moisture is measured every 30 seconds, but radio transmitter is turned on only every 390 seconds to send 13 data points at once. This will significantly increase battery life where the transmitter is turned on every 30 seconds, (because of the overhead of sending a fixed "preambles" each time the transmitter is turned on.)  Additionally, less radio congestion would allow more sensors/tags to be associated to a tag manager at a shorter logging interval. 
• Improvement in temperature and battery voltage resolution. The hardware was capable of approx. 0.4°F resolution measurement, but due to a bug in firmware, the resolution was artificially reduced to about 1°F previously. The battery voltage measurement resolution is also doubled. 
• 70% improvement in moisture level measurement resolution. Previously, the setting was overly conservative to avoid counter overflow for some parts in low capacitance (dry) condition. We did study of part to part reading spread, and also added firmware logic to clip if there is overflow, which allowed us to increase the measurement time by 70% for higher resolution data especially in wet conditions.