Customer Reviews

A Comprehensive Guide to Land Navigation with GPS

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is, as billed, a comprehensive book. So much so that it becomes repetitive. Nevertheless, it omits some important information, and IMHO gets other information wrong. It is also a blatant, and oft-repeated commercial for the author's GPS road map series and more.

The book spends a great deal of time describing the MGRS (old) Grid, but fails to prove that it's better than the far more widely used UTM grid. It also never explains what the MGRS (new) Grid is, why it was developed, or why one should use the (old) system. One gets the impression that the author developed the grid at the time of the Gulf War, built it into his road map series, and doesn't want us to know about its successor.

It's hard to trust an author who recommends the lensatic compass over the modern protractor compass (e.g., Silva). The lensatic requires the user to orient the map in order to to use the compass, and to carry a protractor to transfer azimuths from the compass to the map and vice versa. This is exactly what the protractor compass was designed to avoid!

If you don't know how to use a map and compass, there are better books than this to learn it from.

There is no discussion of GPS problems and how to cope with them. It's not unusual for a GPS receiver to report that you are 2 feet from a waypoint, and then report the waypoint 100 feet away. This is probably the result of another problem with the book: it was written before the government increased the precision of GPS from 100 meters to 10 meters.

The book contains a great many illustrations, most of which are of no use at all. Photos of many different GPS receivers, all now obsolete; photos of outdoor scenes, etc. Many are in full color, and increase the cost of publication.

Finally, one misses a clear, organized description of each feature that can be found on a modern GPS receiver, and what is desireable in each. What screen options do you need? How good must the screen resolution be? What will you need to transfer information to and from a PC? How can one maximize battery life? How does a track differ from a route? When should you use one or the other?

One might be better off to find a compact, more recent reference that is well organized.

Excellent land nav. review for the trained navigator. Concise unbiased info regarding the use of GPS with land nav. skills. Highly recommended.

I'm a 55 year old looking to learn hiking with compass and GPS device. My education is life and a college degree. This book is not one to read casually, yet must be read with total concentration and a large memory. The memory is to store an overwhelming amount of initials and abbreviations. I kept placing bookmarks on pages that I felt needed real concentration. After quite a few of them, I decided this book was too tough for me. So, unless you can find perfect quiet, be fresh and alert, and take plenty notes, you should look elsewhere for navagating instruction.

This is a great book to read if you plan on developing any type of GPS tracking or navigation system. While the book covers the the basics, you'll need some further resources on interfacing GPS receivers and such hardware to real-world devices.

An interesting article entitled "Tracking a Vehicle With GPS" can be read at www.closerworlds.com

A lot of mobile solutions are soon to hit the market such as mobile phones using GSM or GPRS to track a person. This book will help to understand how it all fits together. It would have been nice if the book could have touched on how older communication systems like VHF radios can transmit GPS data. For that you'll have to visit www.closerworlds.com or some other website with such resources.