Land nav. books

[rsgard]

I've found that you can download topos for free from the usgs site. I will just put them on a cd and have them printed at a kinkos at the appropriate size.

As of today I've found that one of my coworkers teaches land nav classes. He suggested I start learning with a lensatic compass.

[K.L. Davis]

I highly recommend the store.usgs.gov site... I print maps from there often - note that there is a little work needed to seam maps but it is not bad. While you are there get the TerraGo download, it makes working with your maps a lot simpler.

One thing to keep in mind about the military lensatic compass, is that most of them are card compasses... they are probably easier to learn to use, but they are different than needle compasses - I tend to start people out on a modern baseplate design.

If you are just starting out (my .02 for land based nav would be) to spend very little time on projections and traditional lat-long, and then learn USNG, from there it is easy to pick up MGRS and ultimately learn UTM - even UPS will makes sense at that point.

[rsgard]

This is the compass im looking at. Ive found it for about 30 bucks online.

http://www.brunton.com/product.php?id=421

Im also gonna go with Wilderness navigation as my first book. Its got the highest reviews on amazon.

Is there a significant difference in military nav vs civilian nav?

[K.L. Davis]

This is the compass im looking at. Ive found it for about 30 bucks online.

http://www.brunton.com/product.php?id=421

Good compass, actually great for the price - I really like the Circle-Over-Circle system that Brunton uses.

Im also gonna go with Wilderness navigation as my first book. Its got the highest reviews on amazon.

Excellent book...

Is there a significant difference in military nav vs civilian nav?

The biggest difference is what motivates you to do it... what I posted earlier about the lensatic compass is that they are generally a "card" compass, whereas most all of the commercial compasses, and the books and stuff out there, are based on a needle compass - there is a little difference in how you use them, but the data and information you get from them is used the same way, regardless of which type of compass you use.

[Ga Shooter]

This is the compass im looking at. Ive found it for about 30 bucks online.

http://www.brunton.com/product.php?id=421

Im also gonna go with Wilderness navigation as my first book. Its got the highest reviews on amazon.

Is there a significant difference in military nav vs civilian nav?

Me too. I like the looks of that compass.

Book I am going with is Wilderness Navigation: Finding Your Way Using Maps, etc.

I realized at looking at this thread that my previous experience was just with a local map and compass of areas that I was very familiar with.

I want to get into hiking and camping again. I think this will be great.

[Ga Shooter]

I went ot the local Bass Pro Shop yeasterday and they had the compass that we are looking at. It does look nice and versatile. They wanted $80.00 which is almost $30.00 above retail so I did not buy it from them, but I think it will be a good choice especially since K.L. Davis put his stamp of approval on it.

[sandsunsurf]

I second the recommendation for GPS Land Navigation (Ferguson). Great book, covers a lot of good material.

I also agree not to spend too much time with angular coordinate systems- I say after you have the basics figured out, jump right in to using UTMs. If you can get your hands on real USGS maps, you can use a commercial UTM tool and you'll be able to plot very accurately. If you print your own maps, you may find that the scale is off, or the scale won't match any standards, i.e. 1:24,000. You can make an improvised tool for any scale and still get good precision, but...

[Von Rheydt]

I highly recommend the store.usgs.gov site... I print maps from there often - note that there is a little work needed to seam maps but it is not bad. While you are there get the TerraGo download, it makes working with your maps a lot simpler.

USGS is an excellent reference and source. I did a Masters and some Doctoral work in Geographic Information Systems some years ago and had a fair bit of contact with them. If you take the time to google around some of the better Universities there are many, many, free resources out there for mapping, map based navigation and also a couple of satelite image resources beyond bing.

I still prefer my Silva Military 4 compass, marked in degrees and mils.

http://www.outdoorgb.com/p/Silva_Mil...dBundle=169116

Links:

http://www.princeton.edu/~oa/manual/mapcompass.shtml

http://www.archive.org/details/militarysketchin00grie

http://www.lib.utk.edu/cic/gpsintro/gpslink.htm

http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~dbertuc...-examples.html

http://library.buffalo.edu/asl/guides/geography.html#5

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswe...ngmadeeasy.pdf

[BenBru]

If you're still looking for a good book look for a copy of the Land Navigation MCI (Marine Corps Institute class) that goes from the basic use of a mil style compass, to using a map, to finding non-linear distances, when I took the course (all MCIs are correspondence) it came with a topo map and a protractor for the test portion...

Overall it does its job very very well.