Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)During the Iraqi and Afghanistan campaigns, soldiers needed to know fairly precise windspeed for artillery and marksmanship purposes.In fact, some rifle scopes today expect the user to own a kestrel wind speed meter and need the data from the meter to compute the scope adustment.
Kestrel worked with the US DOD to make the 4500NV (after all the 4000 was hunter orange) - in fact they worked so hard that the backlight on the 4500NV (NV stands for Night Vision) is so dim that it is not as useful as the standard 4500 (bright yellow case) which has a nightlight like a timex indiglo watch (too much for our Gen 3 NV systems).
The download data function *IS* very slow - the reason is that the case is weather sealed and the data is sent and received using infrared diodes on the back of the case.Back in the days prior to usb, these went to a 2400 - 9600 baud serial line, and they were fine.The USB version of the data adapter maintains the clock rates of the old serial standard to be compatible.
The biggest win for the user is that on the 4000 you had to leave it turned on all the time if you wanted a graph of weather readings every XX minutes to predict the weather.It did a great job graphing, but also drained the battery, and there was no way to tell the 4000 to wake up every 30 minutes, take a reading, and go back to sleep.The 4500 series does this so now you get accurate weather without wasting batteries.In fact, 2 batteries which lasted 3 days on the 4000 can last 3 months on the 4500 due to this one simple improvement.
Other military uses of the Kestrel are the Heat Index function which is used to ensure troops do not become dehydrated and to assess the risk of heat stroke in the summer sands of iraq.High in the mountains of Afghanistan and other-stans the windchil function is of great value.
For civilian uses, the 4500NV looks cool but unfortunately you give up alot of usage when the brighter glow of the 4500's backlight would be nice.The 4000 was made in 2 colors - hunter orange and black.It's too bad kestrel marries the feature set with the case color.
Other than that they are identical.A pet peeve of mine is that you can not strap on the computer interface while the unit is in the windvane to give direction data.If you could, you would get live, real time weather data.unfortunately the cable drag would be prohibitive so you must collect data over time, then remove the unit from the windvane and dowload the data.I guess you can't have your cake and eat it too.
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Product Description:
The Kestrel 4500 NV measures every environmental condition simply with the press of a button! This unit has a night-vision preserving backlight which helps users to sustain natural night vision. The NV's backlight incorporates an optical filter to reduce overall brightness and minimize blue and green spectrum light to preserve night vision. Additionally, NV backlights are also much dimmer than a standard backlight, making it more difficult to detect with the naked eye in night operations. This backlight appears soft greyish pink, not red, and is still in the visible spectrum, so is not compatible with night-vision equipment. The US Military relies on the Kestrel NV Weather Meters to remain as tough as their operations.
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