Comprehensive Guide to Land Navigation With Gps [Paperback]

Noel J. Hotchkiss (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0964127334 | ISBN-13: 978-0964127333 | Publication Date: January 1996 | Edition: Revised

This is a practical hands-on guide, written for the novice and experienced navigator alike, who wish to fully apply the advantages and experience the enjoyment of using the Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. Whether you are considering the first purchase of a GPS receiver, already using GPS for outdoor sports and recreational activities or would like to start using GPS in your car, this book will provide you will the knowledge and skills required to get the most out of this exciting new technology. Included with the book is a free CD ROM featuring MAPTECH's digital map software and a sample topographic map. With this software you can interpret, manipulate, and customize USGS topographic maps; determine distances and elevation changes; profile areas to be navigated; upload and download coordinates, waypoints, and routes between a PC and compatible GPS units; and print customized maps to carry along during treks in the woods.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Originally published in 1994, this book was the first to recognize the tremendous potential of GPS navigation to the outdoor recreational user. It has become a widely used text for GPS instruction and is a popularly quoted reference in a rapidly expanding field of GPS training and education. This new Edition represents the most extensive revision and expansion of the book since its initial release over 5 years ago. The all new Third Edition has been expanded from 187 to 331 pages and remains the only full color publication of its kind, with hundreds of illustrations that help bring teaching points to life. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Author

Each time I browse through a bookstore, I'm always fascinated by the variety of books on what seems to be an infinite number of topics and I frequently wonder how some of these authors happened to develop both the interest and expertise in their subjects. As the author of "A Comprehensive Guide to Land Navigation with GPS", I decided to provide you with the answer to this question in regard to my book. Hopefully, you'll find it an interesting little story.

Writing this book certainly wasn't the culmination of any conscious long-range plan. Instead, it just seemed to come about naturally. My initial career choice was to become a social science teacher; therefore, I had taken a fair number of geography courses during my undergraduate years at Syracuse University. Having also participated in the U.S. Army ROTC program, I enjoyed a two-year hitch as an armor (tank corps) officer on active duty and another twenty-six years in the Army National Guard and Reserve. While continuing to advance my career in education, I pursued graduate study in education administration and instructional design. And, in addition to all this, I have always had a fascination with maps and greatly enjoy time spent outdoors.

More specifically, the road to writing this book started back in the mid-1980s when I submitted an article to "Infantry Magazine", a professional training journal published by the Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, GA. My paper suggested several instructional changes the Army might make to improve our soldiers' sorely lacking map interpretation and land navigation skills. It was clear from my own experiences, as well as the statistics coming out of the relatively new National Training Center at Fort Irwin, CA, that the inability of our soldiers to navigate over unfamiliar terrain was responsible for many of the mistakes being made on the training field and failed missions and casualties on the battlefield. In fact, I saw it as the "Murphy's Law" of tactical execution.

To my surprise, shortly after the article appeared in the journal, I was contacted by a representative of the Army Research Institute (ARI) and offered an opportunity to serve as a civilian consultant working as part of their newly formed land navigation task force charged with designing new instructional techniques and programs for improving these critical soldier skills. They said they liked my ideas and wished to further pursue them. By 1991, we had developed a number of prototype instructional packages and the Army's performance in the Gulf War demonstrates that soldiers can better find their way.

As the ARI project was winding down, Saddam Hussein was rapidly gaining the attention of the Royal Family in Saudi Arabia. Suddenly, it seemed imperative that the Saudi military hone their basic soldiering skills to keep the monster on their northern border at bay. Somehow my name was passed along to Alexis, which had been awarded a contract to train troops at the Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces Institute at Jeddah. Serving as an instructional design consultant for Alexis, as well as the author of their land navigation training package and contract navigation instructor, I was able to personally field test and further refine the work we had done at Fort Benning. Furthermore, this all coincided with the time the new GPS technology was moving from the experimental realm to real world applications.

It wasn't long before we were talking and consulting with GPS manufacturers, those involved in the commercial map industry, and groups wishing to explore the many applications for this new technology. By 1994, it was obvious that the fledgling GPS industry was about to explode into a vast new market and there was obviously a pressing need for this book. We are pleased to have been the first to provide outdoor and general GPS consumers with a guide written to apply the advantages of GPS to their navigational requirements. We are also pleased that it has been so well received and that we have been able to continue to revise and expand its contents to keep pace with both the developing technology and the needs of the consuming public. It has been an interesting and rewarding experience to have been involved in writing this book. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 187 pages
• Publisher: Alexis Pub; Revised edition (January 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0964127334
• ISBN-13: 978-0964127333
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 7.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,646,323 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Less selling, more information, September 14, 2001

By 

George Berman (Boca Raton, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Comprehensive Guide to Land Navigation with GPS (Paperback)

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.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent land nav. review with unbiased GPS information, March 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Comprehensive Guide to Land Navigation With Gps (Paperback)

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

1.0 out of 5 stars This book is much too complicated for a beginner., July 11, 2010

By 

Penelope Penworthy - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Comprehensive Guide to Land Navigation with GPS (Paperback)

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.