Koda wrote:Im curious what are the specific tasks taught in a GPS class?
My take on it is a GPS device is a lot like a cell phone, 95% of what you do with it is not what its main purpose it… to get you to a waypoint, and that’s really it. Teaching someone how to virtually drop a pin on an on-screen map and hit “go to” and following an arrow pointer, isn’t really teaching them how to navigate… in the truest sense of navigation anyways. They probably don’t even need to set/adjust for declination with a gps. The rest of the functions are mostly irrelevant, importing and exporting tracks, base maps, EG, notes, moon phases, etc. etc.… yeah, its cool to see your track on a computer screen later on though.
I was going to try and type up a response on my phone last night, but that just wasn't working out.
What I meant by my statement, was that you could
train someone to pull a set of coordinates off a GPS, but if they didn't know coordinate systems, or what to do with them it's just a pile of numbers.
For the most part, if I'm teaching GPS, I've already taught them
compass work (shooting / following bearings in the field),
map work (terrain association, coordinate systems, etc), and
map & compass work (plotting bearings, finding bearings, distance, etc). They have a fundamental understanding of navigation in general, so the terminology and the material from a GPS fits into a larger skillset.
Most people will never use
all the features on a GPS, but in order to be competent I would say the short list would be somewhere along knowing how to:
- Turn it on and change batteries (you'd be surprised)
- How to tell if you have an accurate fix
- Basic understanding of the satellite screen
- Setup
- Map Datum
- Position Format (coordinate system)
- North Reference
- Distance Units
- Heading Display
- Create a waypoint for a current location
- Create a waypoint for a given location
- Edit an existing waypoint
- Delete a waypoint
- Clearing Tracks
- Starting Tracks
- Saving Tracks
That would just be for the using side, there's more to that list if you're the one pulling data off the GPS and onto a computer or something. If you can do *that* stuff, and you have the basics for map and compass down, I think you've got a good knowledge base to build on.