wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: GPS device units
Landis Bennett 2005-Jun-19 18:48:00
As Markus says, you'll want your datum to be WGS 84 (pretty much the
standard for most uses). You're looking for the position format. I'm
looking at a Garmin eTrex Summit. In the menu under 'Setup' units
should be changed to
h ddd? mm' ss.s (which is degrees, minutes, decimal seconds).
Other useful settings include degrees, decimal minutes (which is what
it probably defaulted to when you first got it ) and decimal degrees
(the WWP Application has a conversion for this). Other people like the
UTM format. But the rest of the position formats are pretty
specialized and you can safely ignore them.
If you've already recorded your coordinates in degrees, decimal minutes
(h ddd? mm.mmm') you can do the conversion to degrees/minutes/decimal
seconds pretty quickly with a calculator. There are 60 seconds in a
minute so mutliply the decimal portion of your minutes by 60 and you'll
get seconds. For instance, 50.5' (minutes) is (.5 x 60 = 30) 50' 30"
(50 minutes, 30 seconds).
Hope this helps.
-Landis
On Jun 19, 2005, at 8:25 AM, Caroling Geary wrote:
> There is a setting for Map Datum at WGS 84.
> But there is no choice for that for the Position Format setting.
> When I set Position Format to British, my position goes to zero. There
> is no choice for USA.
> My default setting gets the YY:yy part right. It is the last two digits
> that are off, as in YY:yy:NN, where NN are the last two digits I need.
> I'm getting three digits that are maybe meters or something?
> I suppose I can plug the numbers into a conversion page.
> But it would be nice to read it off the GPS unit.