Mounted search and rescue

["Chuck Daniel" <iwhound@voyager.net>]

Over the past weekend, our group did some routine GPS training in the form of a treasure hunt.  What should of gone smoothly turned out poorly.  Here is what happened.  One in our group set out the course, depositing the treasures and recording the latitude and longitude of each treasure (way points).  She returned and gave us the coordinates and we inputted them into our GPS units.  We broke into teams and off we went.  My team found the first two locations but that may of been by luck since we noted that in each case the coordinates were off by 30 seconds in both lat and long.

The rest of the treasures were never found because of the 30 seconds error.  A 30 second error is over a half mile of error.  What we learned from this is that we need to compare all GPS units periodically.

 

Chuck Daniel

KVMSAR