How long has it been since you had a picnic? Yeah, I thought so.

As you can see, Bate Island is in the middle of the Ottawa River. You can get to it if you go over the Island Park bridge. It’s a favourite place for kayakers, because of the nearby rapids… we counted an even dozen, as well as two brave lads who were running the rapids in a canoe. Roast beef sandwiches aside, the afternoon’s picnic became a delightful excuse to try out some new toys: a couple of HOBO data loggers, Forrest Mims‘ Photometer/Radiometer, and a neat second-hand GPS…

We used the HOBOs to track the temperature change in the air and the Ottawa river. There’s a couple hours of useful data, tracking the different speeds at which the water and air cool down in the evening. Of course, it would be really nice to get a full 24 or 48 hour water & air temperature log. Taking one reading per minute, the HOBOs can go for over two days, so that might be suitable. The trouble is finding a place where it’s okay to leave them unattended for the duration, without having to worry about them being stolen, washed downstream, or eaten by wildlife.

Anyhow, once logged, all this wonderful data can then be dumped onto a computer — where it can be manipulated, graphed, and analyzed. While I wasn’t quite sure if HOBOware’s Excel export function would work with OpenOffice, the data seems to be coming through all right (so far)… of course, whether or not I can get a proper chart out of the latter program remains to be seen.

The “Sun & Sky Monitoring Station” is standard RadioShack issue (though it’s been discontinued, making it somewhat more difficult to get your hands on one). Depending on how it’s used, it can be either a photometer or a radiometer. Now, it takes a while to get the hang of using the instrument, as taking accurate measurements of atmospheric haze and water vapor is kind of complex. Forrest Mims gave an interesting talk about the photometer at the SAS conference, describing not only its uses, but also the story of its design and manufacture. Neat stuff.

The GPS unit is old, a Garmin GPS 45. While it took about 10 minutes to get the first location fix (N 45°24’34.2” W 075°45’17.8”), a later attempt only took a minute or two. Like the Photometer/Radiometer, the unit has many features and settings – which means that it could be a while before I get everything figured out. It seems that there are many ways of expressing coordinates… I set the GPS readout to a familiar looking Degrees/Minutes/Seconds format, as opposed to the UTM grid format. There’s a discussion of the different types here.