Native Tree Society BBS

Hello,

I am a retired ‘green’ professional, specialized in tree care and urban trees. Nowadays I run a small consultant office to stay active in tree care business and spent more time to visit monumental trees in Scandinavia, Germany and Great Brittain. Before I incidentally used a pencil & measure tape, nose-cross or the Blume-Leiss apparatus for measuring tree heights.
Nowadays I come more and more in situations I want to know the right height of a tree. For that I bought last year the Nikon 550A Ranger-Finder. After some experiments and talks with college’s (thank you Jeroen) I think I am finding the right way to measure the height of trees with this Nikon 550A.

With pleasure I read the publication ”The Really, Really Basics of Laser Rangefinder/Clinometer Tree Height Measurements” dated January 12, 2010.
About the wider beam of the 550A than the 440: can anybody tell how wide it is at a certain distance?

Welcome to the Native Tree Society. I will try to find the specs again. I know I saw them once. The differences in the published beam width did not seem very large, but there is a observable difference in how well each was able to read through smaller openings and clutter when used in the field. Perhaps the 440 had on average achieved a narrower beam than specified? There are a number of members of the NTS who are successfully using the equivalent to 550A here. It is a capable instrument.

Ed Frank