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Change settings to decimal degrees


bakenia

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4 hours ago, bakenia said:

Can I set my preferences to decimal degrees?

 

On the website and official app, I think not.  GPSr, probably.  Other apps, no idea.

 

4 hours ago, bakenia said:

Why do you work with degrees/minutes anyhow?

 

I live at approximately N51 19 W0 37.  A minute north/south is just over a mile.  A minute east/west is about a kilometre.  This is much harder to visualise in decimal degrees.

 

4 hours ago, bakenia said:

It is so difficult to enter the correct coordinates.

 

Yet you’re much less likely to make a mistake - I think it’s easier to enter these punctuated formats than a ‘simple’ string of digits.

 

4 hours ago, bakenia said:

With all these ° ' " notations!   

 

Generally (but not always) you can get away without the symbols.

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7 hours ago, bakenia said:

Can I set my preferences to decimal degrees? Why do you work with degrees/minutes anyhow? It is so difficult to enter the correct coordinates. With all these ° ' " notations!   

 

You can enter coordinates in desimal degrees. In most places the system accepts them automatically. Especially when you enter Corrected Coordinates aka Solved Coordinates you can use decimal degrees. Can you explain when you have to enter those hybrid coordinates?

Edited by arisoft
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7 hours ago, IceColdUK said:

Yet you’re much less likely to make a mistake - I think it’s easier to enter these punctuated formats than a ‘simple’ string of digits.

Another way in which it helps prevent mistakes is that there are limits on some the values. For example, I can enter N56.456778 E22.235468 with a mistake in one or more of the decimal digits and still have valid coordinates, so I may not realize I had made a mistake. However, if I fat-finger things and try to enter N56 72.678 E22 61.887, any reasonable system would reject my coordinates because you can't have more than 60 minutes, so I'll know right away.

 

In the end, though, one of the main reasons they went with degrees, decimal minutes was that most GPSRs came from the factory set to use this format. I think it was a reasonable decision to not make everyone change their settings in order to work with this site.

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2 hours ago, The A-Team said:

if I fat-finger things and try to enter N56 72.678 E22 61.887, any reasonable system would reject my coordinates because you can't have more than 60 minutes, so I'll know right away.

 

Well... you can have as many minutes as you want. For example, 120 minutes is 2 hours. It works the same way with degrees and many tools understand this correctly.

Edited by arisoft
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9 hours ago, The A-Team said:

Another way in which it helps prevent mistakes is that there are limits on some the values. For example, I can enter N56.456778 E22.235468 with a mistake in one or more of the decimal digits and still have valid coordinates, so I may not realize I had made a mistake. However, if I fat-finger things and try to enter N56 72.678 E22 61.887, any reasonable system would reject my coordinates because you can't have more than 60 minutes, so I'll know right away.

 

In the end, though, one of the main reasons they went with degrees, decimal minutes was that most GPSRs came from the factory set to use this format. I think it was a reasonable decision to not make everyone change their settings in order to work with this site.

If you make mistake in any decimal, you don't have valid coordinates. IMO it's better to make a big mistake so it's easier to detect. Even better if the program or application tells you so upfront.

 

I would think any program works internally with decimal degrees so if your input has two or three numbers of input per lat/long, then it just assumes the 2nd and 3rd are in base 60 and convert them accordingly. They might even be negative.

 

 

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14 hours ago, papu66 said:

If you make mistake in any decimal, you don't have valid coordinates.

If I meant to type 56.456789 and instead type 56.456987, it's still valid. It isn't correct, but it's a valid number for the decimal format. On the other hand, N56 72.678 would be considered invalid for the degrees, decimal minutes format (or should be if the tool is validating the input like it should).

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21 hours ago, arisoft said:

Well... you can have as many minutes as you want. For example, 120 minutes is 2 hours. It works the same way with degrees and many tools understand this correctly.

Sure, you could try to describe N50 00.000 by entering N48 120.000, but who would do that? Any reasonable tool should either reject the latter or at least alert the user, because it would be an error in almost every instance. Silently accepting it would be very bad UI.

 

Just for kicks, I tried doing just this in Google Maps, and it doesn't know what I'm talking about. I'd say that's the correct response to this kind of input.

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10 minutes ago, The A-Team said:

If I meant to type 56.456789 and instead type 56.456987, it's still valid. It isn't correct, but it's a valid number for the decimal format. On the other hand, N56 72.678 would be considered invalid for the degrees, decimal minutes format (or should be if the tool is validating the input like it should).

My bad, I misunderstood valid to mean correct.

 

Still if I type coordinates as say 60° 58' and want to try 5 min more,for some reason,  I can just type 60° 63' and the program will correct it to 61° 03'. At least the correct coordinates seems to work this way. However, if I subtract back to 61° -02' it just ignores the minus sign. Not working logically there.

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On 2/12/2019 at 9:37 AM, bakenia said:

Can I set my preferences to decimal degrees?

 

If you're talking about the website, it's already set to DDD MM.MMM.  So, not really, though if you enter decimal degrees in places like the map or the search function, it should return results. 

 

If you're talking about on your GPSr or some other device, you may need to refer to your owner's manual for help.

 

 

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