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Posted by Bill S on February 28, 2008 at 7:48:00 pm EST
In reply to weather/altimeter watches posted by Guyz on February 28, 2008 at 12:32:47 pm EST

There are several companies that make handheld size units. One company that sells them is Ambient Weather - http://www.ambientweather.com/handheldlt.html My early acquaintance with lightning detectors was the early StormScopes, made for small aircraft. These fairly quickly developed into units that could show direction and distance, and are now often included in small aircraft weather radars that are fairly effective at weather avoidance. The handheld units are similar to the 1st generation or 2 of StormScopes, in that they give a rough indication of distance and strike frequency. The StrikeAlert is the smallest and cheapest at about $60-70. It isn't sophisticated, but is adequate for hikers who pay attention to the warnings.

One thing about the "wrist-top computers" like the Suunto units and the Polar heart rate monitors that include altimeters - these are pretty useful for keeping records of your day's hike profile - altitude gained and lost, and with the foot pods or GPSR add-on modules, the distance covered. And, of course, the adults in the group need the HRM to find out how much they are struggling up the hill... er, I mean, how much benefit from the training they are getting. You do need a computer to download and graph the information, but they have enough memory to store a whole Philmont trek (if you set the memory interval to 1 min or longer). If you look at my Africa report on this website (look on the News section), you will see my daily altitude gain and loss for the hike up and down Kilimanjaro (ok, ok, I am one of the gear freaks who keeps track of everything - but it's kind of fun to track this trivia).

If you really want to track the weather, I suggest the Kestrel 4000 or 4500 "pocket weather stations". These measure barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, and windspeed, and use these to calculate altitude, density altitude, wind chill, relative humidity, dew point, heat index, and with the 4500 which has a flux-gate compass in it, wind direction with headwind and cross-wind components (for the pilots in the crowd). Both of them log all the data at a user-specified interval (5 minutes or longer if you want to do a whole trek's worth). Since they display graphs of the data, you can have the unit record overnight and see whether the barometer has risen or fallen in that period (to be useful, the unit has to stay in the same place during that time period). They don't have lightning detectors in them, though.

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