feet as compared to decimal points or seconds

[+DscGlfGuru]

MY GPS died from battery failure while I was approaching a cache site. I was at 44.306 and was heading for 44.458 How would I determine the number of feet between these two points?

 

In another instance. I keep loosing accurate signal while nearing a cache site. My GPS starts jumping around spuradically when I get within .05 of the waypoint. Is there a mathmatical formula for changing points or seconds into feet or yards?

[rag-a-muffin]

I was wondering this VERY SAME thing about a week ago, and this is what I came up with:

 

I think this is possible with latitude, but for longitude, the distance in feet measured by one degree, one minute, one second, etc. would be very different based on your latitude. Confused yet? For example...at the north and south poles, lines of longitude would be VERY close together, thus one degree would not be very far at all. However, at the equator, one degree of longitude is significantly larger. Make sense? Maybe someone else can make it a little bit clearer...I'm having a hard time trying to explain it.

[Tahosa and Sons]

Learn how to use UTM's they are easier to plot your position than using lat and long.

 

Tahosa - Dweller of the Mountain Tops.

[+brad.32]

See Markwell's geocaching FAQ at http://www.markwell.us/

 

... particularly "How many feet are in 0.001 minutes?"

 

UTMs avoid this because they are in projected meters, but local to the Zone.

[+EScout]

You can use the "project-to" function, or make a route with the two waypoints. On Garmins, the distance with be in one-hundredths of a mile if the distance is over a tenth of a mile. (5280 feet in a mile).

 

Or you can calculate it using the distance of one-thousandth of a minute. (Use the feet per .001 of a minute from Markwell's site)

[dsandbro]

Jumping around as you get close is normal. It does not mean your unit is going bonkers.

 

========================================

Friends don't let Friends geocache drunk.

[+Renegade Knight]

Change your screen so you are using the goto function. Then your distance is decimal miles. 0.1 = 528 feet etc. As long as you keep your bearing right and it tells you your distance you will have good idea where you are going.

 

Wherever you go there you are.

[charlesml]

digging up my old aviation ground school textbook....1/2 a degree is 30 nautical miles, which is about 38 statute miles, but this only works for the distance between latitude, the distance between longitude varies a lot from the pole to the equator

[+ZingerHead]

If you're within 50 feet of the cache, stop looking at the GPS screen and start looking at the area for a likely hiding spot. 9 times out of 10 you'll find the cache faster this way, rather than blindly following the GOTO arrow. And if you decelerate from a brisk walk to an uncertain wander, you'll throw off the GPS every time as it adjusts to the change in speed. And Tahosa's right - UTMs are a whole lot simpler to understand.

 

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numbers, and those who don't.