Dave590

I was in Uncle Sams Navy from '83-'93. EN1-(SW) Served on the USS Sumter (LST-1181) YTB's in Mayport Fla.(Cheng) And as an inspection team member for diesel and boiler operated ships out of Norfolk. It was some of the best times I have ever had. I'm new to this board, so excuse me if what I say next is out of line, But I can generally just "Tell" by first impressions if a person I meet for the first time has served or not. Their demeanor is just,,,well,,,different. A military, or "ex" military person tends to simply "carry" or "present" themselves differently than others.

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I've been checking out the different topics and home page throughout the course of the day and I have a question. Before I pose my question, I think I should give a little bit of my own navigational background. I Hunt, Fish, and backpack in some very large tracts of land,,,, close to a couple of million acres. My navigational tools include a GPS, Compass, grid reader and 1;24,000 scale maps of the area's I'm in. It's not particularily unusual for me to be out for a week or more at a time. I tend to use the GPS more often than not, but enjoy using other methods of navigation also... methods such as compass, or sun and stars. Now here is my question, and I'm asking this not to sound pretentious, but because I have not really seen it discussed in any of the topics that I have read thus far... Do you guys generally use only the maps that are downloaded into either your GPS's and PDA's (I have no idea what a PDA "is"...I've only read about them on here ) or do you tend to use real honest to goodness "paper" maps that require pencil and protractor plotting.

Thanks septic tank....By the way,,,,,How did you come upon a screen name like that.

Prime Suspect, Thats interesting...As I mentioned, most maps that are available here are of the UTM format. When you mention "out of the box", I have found that, for here in Virginia, The UTM format is pretty much all there is...Unless you want to go with a gazeeter type 1;50,000 scale map. The typical 1:24,000 scale map here is gonna be a UTM format.

Thanks for the reply Spoo, I was in Uncle Sam's Navy back in the eighties and early nineties...The Loran "Charlie" was, at the time, the hottest thing since sliced bread. I've not seen much mentioned here (I'll admit, I'm still searching) about maps in general. As much as I enjoy using my GPS, I still like to use landmarks and azimuths as my primary means of finding my specific location. Do the folks on here generally use the maps that are displayed on their GPS units, or is it common to use a "sure enough" map.?

Hello all! I just found out about this site today. I have recently written a book about outdoor navigation and had "heard" about the concept of geocaching. In a conversation today, I was discussing the idea of "hiding" stuff in the woods for other folks to find when the name of this site came up. I am very interested in starting a local "group" so-to-speak, and look foward to finding stuff that others have already put out there to find. I could'nt help but notice that most of the topics on here reference lat and long in Hours minuts and seconds...I generally use UTM and NAD 1927...Is that as unusual for the folks on here? The maps available around here are ALL in UTM, NAD 1927. In fact, I would go so far as to say; It's next to impossable to even FIND a map other than the UTM format. Anyway, Hello!!! And I look foward to coming here often!