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Kestrel 4000
Pocket Weather Tracker
Owner Review
Name: Jerry Goller
Age: 57
Gender: Male
Height: 6’ (1.8 m)
Weight: 230 pounds (104 kg)
Email address: JerryGollerATBackpackGearTestDOTorg
City, State, Country: Salt Lake
City, Utah, USA
Date: 7/2/2004
Backpacking Background:
I started backpacking with my father at age 6 or so. I’ve backpacked, off and
on, all of my life. Even in the Marine Corps, I was in the Infantry. I consider
myself a light weight backpacker with an average dry pack weight of 10 to 15
pounds (4.5 to 7 kilograms), depending on the season and terrain.
Most of my trips are 2 to 5 days long and in Utah. That means they can be from
around 12,000 ft (3600 m) to 3,000 ft (900 m). The temperatures range from 100+F
(38 C) to -15 F or so (-15 C). Utah is a dry state and humidity can drop as low
as 10%. My trips are usually in the Wasatch or Uinta mountains and the red rock
canyon country of southern Utah. I go at least twice a month. I also, from time
to time, take much longer trips lasting one to two months or more. These trips
are usually on the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail.
Product Information
Manufacturer: Nielsen-Kellerman Company
Year of Manufacture: 2002
MSRP: $329.00
Manufacturer’s URL: http://www.nkhome.com/
Listed weight: 3.6 oz
(102 g)
Weight as delivered: As listed
Product Description: The Kestrel 4000 is a light, compact weather station
that is capable of storing up to 250 sampled Measurements. Measurement
sampling intervals can be user set in a range of every 2 seconds to every 12
hours. This results in a memory time span of 8 minutes, 20 seconds to 17 weeks,
6 days.
The unit is capable of measuring Wind Speed, Temperature, Wind
Chill, Humidity, Heat Index, Dew Point, Wet Bulb,
Barometric Pressure, Altitude, and Density Altitude. It can
also display Minimum, Maximum, and Average readings from it's memory.
Battery requirements: 2 AA batteries, supplied.
Field Information
Locations Where the Tests Were Conducted: Throughout Utah
Description of Location: The tests were conducted in the Uinta and Wasatch
mountains, and Zion, Bryce, Canyonlands, Grand Canyon, and Crater Lake National
Parks, among other places.
Weather Conditions: Conditions ranged from alpine winter to desert summer
and most everything in between.
Field Test Results
I started keeping track of temperature lows when
backpacking 20 years ago. I used a mechanical low temperature recording
thermometer from Taylor and kept notes in a small notebook I carried with me. I
used the information I gathered to make tent and sleeping bag decisions for
future trips. There was other weather related information I would have liked to
have had for those decisions but I knew of no practical way of getting it. Even
checking historical records for the time I was in the area wouldn't be accurate.
Microclimates can be wildly different than the general weather for the area. I
knew what I really wanted was a miniature weather station hooked to a miniature
computer so I could record many different data such as humidity, dew point,
chill factor, and wind speed, among others. Ah, it was but a dream...until I saw
the Kestrel 4000 Pocket Weather Tracker from Nielsen-Kellerman. There it was,
everything I wanted to know and all of it stored in memory! I couldn't wait to
get my hands on one. Little did I know how much it would change my gear testing.
I'm not going to turn this into a long review by taking the Instruction Manual
and go through it item by item, in detail. That publication is available on the
company's website and can be downloaded as a PDF file. I strongly suggest you
read it for more detailed information about this unit. The Instruction Manual
will also give the accuracy of each of the individual Measurements. I've
found the accuracy to be more than sufficient for my use. Temperature is
accurate to +/- 1 C and Humidity is accurate to +/- 3%.
What I will do is tell you what it does, in general, and how easy it is to use.
The Kestrel 4000 not only measures weather data, it also remembers it. This is
its most powerful feature. The way data is accessed with the Kestrel 4000 makes
this feature extremely easy to use.
The picture to the left shows the start up screen you get after turning the
unit on by pressing the red button. Ninety-five percent of everything I want to
know I can access by using the cursor keys and the center ( --
) button. After a few seconds, the start up screen goes away and the last screen
you view will appear. If the (--)
button is pressed, the unit immediately goes to the last screen viewed. If the
(--) button is again pressed,
the main menu will appear. This menu allows for setting up the unit and the
clearing of its memory. The menu allows the following, among other things, to be
done:
Memory Options:
Clear Log clears all stored data.
Reset MMA (Min/Max/Avg) clears all Min/Max/Avg data. Chart data remains
intact.
Auto Store When this feature is ON,
data is automatically stored at preset Store Rate. When it is OFF,
data is only stored when manually captured with the Camera Icon button
(upper left button)
Store Rate sets the frequency at which data sets are automatically stored.
More frequent store rates decrease battery life. When the unit is off,
data in not stored for the 2 second and 5 second Store Rates. I keep mine
set at the 30 minute Store Rate.
Overwrite setting only applies when the data log is full. When ON,
the oldest data point is discarded to allow memory for the new data point to be
stored. When OFF, new data points are not saved. If I know I'm
going to be home in time, I leave this on so the unit is always recording. With
the frequency set at 30 minutes the unit will store 5 days and 5 hours worth of
data. That covers most of the trips I take. If I wanted to stop recording after
a trip, say to allow me time to drive home and download the data, I'd turn the
feature to OFF to hold the trip data and prevent it from being overwritten by
the drive home data. The unit is always recording, even when it is turned off.
Going down the main menu past Memory Options, the user will pass
Measurements and Graph Scale and come to Units. This screen
allows me to set, by item being measured, various units. Refer to the
Instruction Manuel for a list of available units for each measurement.
After User Screens, System (allows various adjustments to the
screen and calibration of certain measurements), Date & Time (12 and 24
hour supported), we come to Language. This screen allows the user to
select English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish.
The last screen is Restore. This allows the user to return the
unit to selected default settings.
I know all of this sounds complicated and involved but it really isn't. Once the
unit is set up, a very simple possess, accessing data is both intuitive and
simple. The UP and Down cursor keys allow the user to scroll
though the 10 Measurements. Once the user arrives at the desired Measurement,
the Left and Right cursor keys allow the user to scroll though the
Modes. The available Modes are Current, Min/Max/Avg,
and Chart. When in the Chart Mode, the user can press the (--)
button to select the specific data point time they want information on. Below
are examples of each of the Mode screens:
Fig. 2 is Temperature displayed
in the Current Mode. Fig. 3 is Temperature
displayed in the Min/Max/Avg Mode. In Fig. 4 Temperature is displayed in the Chart Mode. The data capture
frequency is set to every 30 minutes. This screen is displaying the
Temperature, recorded every 30 minutes, for the last 5 days and 5 hours.
Fig. 5 shows the individual data points
from the previous Chart screen. This particular screen is showing
that the Temperature was 5.4 degrees F at 04:30 hours on July 1st. If, from this screen, I used the Up or Down cursor
keys, I could scroll through this same data for each of the Measurements
at the selected point in time.
This is an extremely important feature. It allows me to determine the
Humidity reading at my highest Temperature reading or the
Dew Point at any given Temperature reading. I can now determine
not only the Temperature last night at various points, but also the
Humidity, and any other Measurement, at those same time points.
Summary
I love this thing! It's very impressive to be able to tell a manufacture the
Temperature, Humidity, and Dew Point when the condensation
started to form on their pre-production tent I was testing. The same applies
when talking to a manufacturer about their new bag, giving them the
Temperature and Humidity at various points through out the night of
testing. I like to know, for my own use, what the Temperature and Heat
Index was when using light weight clothing. This helps me to make more
intelligent gear selection decisions for future trips. The same goes for
sleeping bag and shelter selection. Using it has given me a much better
understanding of how well my gear performs in various weather conditions. It
lets me know how far I can push it.
Nielsen-Kellerman also has an accessory cradle and software to download stored
information to a spreadsheet or database. That would be a report in itself so I
won't go into it now.
The Kestrel 4000 is very power efficient. I wanted to include battery life
expectancy in this report but I realized I couldn't remember ever changing the
supplied batteries. Suffice to say that at least one year battery life is very
conservative.
The supplied Instruction Manuel is basic but comprehensive. To be honest, I
quickly read through it when I first got the unit and never read it again until
I wrote this report. The unit is so intuitive and simple to operate that I
didn't need any other instruction to successfully operate it.
Is the Kestrel 4000 fairly expensive? Yes. Is it worth every penny? To me it
certainly is.
Jerry
Read more reviews of Nielsen-Kellerman Company gear
Read more gear reviews by Jerry Goller
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