I posted a short article on my blog about setting up a GPS for the fall hunting season.

www.outdoorquest.blogspot.com

Blake

You are right, the article is quite short. Thats fine but one piece of data is a MUST.

I listen to the dispatchers 10 hours a day. When it involves a GPS, there is ALWAYS one major problem.

The owner of the GPS has not set the units to -

hddd.ddddd

If the lost/injured hunters attempts to transmit his location in degrees, minutes, seconds and 10th of a second, HE has created the problem. The listening dispatcher may not understand the terms. The retransmitted version by the dispatcher may not be understood by the untrained officers. The chopper will not be given the correct location. Rescue will be delayed.

If the UNITS on your GPS are set to degrees and decimal degrees, the screen will come up N 43.96633 W 116.18937.

Practice reading this correctly –

My location is -
NORTH Forty three point nine six six three three
WEST One one six point one eight nine three seven.

PLEASE REPEAT AND CONFIRM.

I don't think this is universally true. I can't speak to how dispatch works in your area. However, I am a volunteer with a local SAR team. Around here SAR missions often involve helicopters. Our local SAR air resources seem to much prefer coordinates in degrees and decimal minutes. I have discussed this with the pilot of the State Trooper's helo who we often work with. I also discussed it with a pilot from one of our local helicopter medivac companies, and he said said the same thing. Using decimal degrees, as you recommend, makes it harder for air resources and adds the potential for errors and confusion.

In this case your coordinates would be: N 43 deg 57.980 min W 116 deg 11.362 min

Input

"N 43 deg 57.980 min W 116 deg 11.362 min"

into Google maps and you get -

"We could not understand the location N 43 deg 57.980 min W 116 deg 11.362 min"

See if you can find any system or person that cannot process -

N 43.96633 W 116.18937

Ponder:

Many SAR teams use the degrees and decimal minutes. Comparing this to Google maps is not a good comparison so to speak. Coincidentally there is a missing person in some very tough terrain close by. I and others are joining the search for her in about 45 minutes and we will also be using degrees / decimal minutes during the search.

Are you saying GOOGLE MAPS is not relavent?

If your communication involves

Transmitting what you see on the screen using voice -
Interpreting voice and typing the location -
Sending emails of the location -
Receiving emails of the location –
Pasting into a mapping program

Then your process has some life threatening holes in it.

Cut and past your location into

http://mapper.acme.com

N 43 deg 57.980 min W 116 deg 11.362 min

It doesn't work. Time wasted. Life threatening error.

Cut and past your location into Garmins Mapsource.
It doesn't work. Time wasted. Life threatening error.

Using GoogleEarth I input "N 43 57.980 W 116 11.362" and it went straight to Ponderosa Sports on the North Fork Payette River.

I don't participate in SAR but I have been involved in air navigation using the lat/long format (vice UTM which I am vaguely familiar with but have never used) for 35 years. Degrees & decimal minutes seems to be the default format and is what I use daily. We can figure out decimal degrees or degrees/minutes/seconds as long as it's clear what format is being used; the format difference is just arithmatic. Given a location in decimal degrees the first thing I'd do is translate that to degrees & decimal minutes so it would be in a format I am used to seeing. Most pilots I know (and I know quite a few) are very comfortable with degrees and decimal minutes.

An interesting discussion.

In my area, the format degrees minutes.minutes is used extensively. Dispatch is conversant in all formats.

My SAR team is trained to shift to the options available with the GPS.

Blake

No. We are saying that there are many mapping packages in common use. Many of those can accept other formats. Often those programs allow one to select which format to use. I use TOPO! and Google Earth form my personal stuff, and set both of those to degrees and Decimal minutes.
Transmitting, typing, email, and pasting all work with other formats. It just depends on what format your local dispatch or SAR folks prefer.

A friend of mine who moved to Alaska from Colorado said that down there UTM is the prefered format for SAR. But around here, a UTM zone boundary runs right through Anchorage. Using UTM becomes more complicated when you have to deal with a zone boundary. Also, here in Alaska, SAR often involves use of aircraft, either for searching, or transporting SAR teams. Hence degrees and decimal minutes has become the default for GPS.

As I get to be a geezer, my SAR role is tending more to training and as part of the SAR management team. I always try to teach folks to be conversent with all the common location formats (degrees & decimal minutes, decimal degrees, UTM, etc), so that they can switch if need be. I also recommend that people always try to give both gps coordinates and location relative to landmarks ("my location is N 61 deg 6.349 min, W 149 deg 38.198 min, on the west ridge of O'Malley peak at about 3250 ft elevation"). This allows for an easy cross check of their location.

Good post. My Garmin 60CSx can use all the standard formats: degrees.decimal degrees, degrees minutes.decimal minutes, degree minutes seconds.decimal seconds, UTM and a whole bunch of what appear to be regional specific formats. It's just math.

As for landmarks, one of the things I did with the GPS kept in my survival vest is to load a number of the local aircraft navaids (TACAN and VOR) into my GPS as waypoints. It makes it easy to communicate bearing and range from a navigational reference available thru a pilot's instrument panel.