NSEW

[Guest lawnboy]

I hope this is not an old question....but when you look at the degrees that are given it looks like they are given in degrees and minutes in a decimal form.

First what happened to the minutes?

How dose one look at a chart and get the right coordinates, if it's in the old way?

Thanks for any help....

[Guest Markwell]

It's an old question, but always worth answering. It can also be found here.

 

The convention used on Geocaching.com is:

H=Hemipshere

D=Degrees

M=Minutes

 

This format: HDD(D)° MM.MMM

 

Mapblast shows the format as all degrees

±DD.DDDDD

 

To convert from decimals to decimals/minutes (example 41.12476):

• + means North and East, - means South and West
• Take the whole number as degrees and set it aside (so far with the example, we're at N41°)
• Take the remainder of the decimals and multiple times 60 (0.12476 x 60 = 7.4856
• make sure to pad extra leading zeros and you have your final answer (N41° 07.4856)
• If you wish to go further into seconds, you do the same thing with the resulting minutes - leave off the whole number and multiply the remainder by 60, but Geocaching's convention is just minutes.