Yes you need a digital thermometer and the one on your rig is lcrap

Have you changed out your stock thermometers or have you picked up a nice digital thermometer?

Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk

this dual probe was about $29.95 on sale. I love to be indoors drinking a beer on hot days. I leave it on the cooking grate 24/7 ,Works great!

Two problems with smoker built-in thermometers: calibration and placement.

The placement problem can't be solved because the probe for measuring the box temp is usually fixed (it is in my MES 30 Gen 1). The calibration is the part that I can't understand because it isn't that hard to calibrate these things, and given that there is digital circuitry involved with most electric smokers, it would be child's play to add a few lines of programming code that would let the user add the two needed calibration numbers (offset and slope) that would let you correct any errors.

The solution, however, is easy and cheap: just buy a remote read thermometer. There are dozens of posts in the past six months on which one to get. There are so many advantages to these things, and they are now so inexpensive (well under $40), that there isn't much reason not to get one.