Wildlife Camera
Another great gift from Mandy. I hope to be able to record visitors to the garden even when I am either at work, holiday or whilst nightfall occurs. It seems quite well speced with the ability to take photos in colour during the day and black and white via the aid of 32 LEDs during the night. It also records short bursts of video and audio which has to be a bonus. I noticed that they used these on Lost Land Of The Tigers with great effect so who knows what may be recorded in this part of the country!!
Weather Stations
Let's be honest to a lot of people recording of the weather is down right geekish but to those of a more data oriented mind weather information is fascinating. I started out with a simple max min thermometer which was the first signs of scary behaviour and before long I was looking for something more up market and a unit that would allow me to view data from indoors. This led me down several paths and below shows those variations in my search for my holy grail of weather data collection.
LIVE weather from the garden HERE
DAVIS VANTAGE VUE & TECHNOLINE & MAX-MIN THERMOMETER
It does the job very well considering it's cost. A good feature is that it comes with software that allows the data collected to be downloaded straight to the computer so that to get a full weather report I don't even have to look at the station as the computer gives a far better and easier to see layout. This data is saved and backed up on the computer. If you have one of these or you are thinking of buying one then one thing you must do is take off the cover of the rain collector and locate the little reed switch that counts the tipping motion. This has wires soldered to it. This part is very susceptible to damp and it will after a winter of use stop working. I was on my third unit before I found out how to stop this from occurring. Simply spray the reed switch area with duck oil or water displacement spray and this will seal the metal connections that are exposed to damp even though it does have a cover.
GPS TRACKER
This will be particularly helpful when using it abroad as it is designed to track via satellites where in the world I am and by means of recording the coordinates of longitude and latitude to this unit I can then import them to Google maps or Google Earth.
IPOD RECORDER
Handy gadget as this turn your ipod into a voice recorder that times each record as and when you start it.
PC NOTEBOOK
I purchased this at a decent enough price to allow use abroad as a way of downloading any pictures, data and to access the internet. It weighs in at about 1.4KG and runs WIN XP which I like. It has a large 160gb hard drive with 1gb of RAM.