Outdoor Guide to Using Your GPS

Book excerpt: No matter what you're doing in the outdoors, you may need help navigating from place to place-and remembering how to get back. A compass and a map are excellent tools, and knowing how to use them will make it even easier to learn how to use your Global Positioning System unit. The author has been involved with teaching people how to use GPS for many years. In this book he shares the answers to all the questions a novice might ask: What is GPS? How does it work? How accurate is it? Does it work anywhere? Is it for traveling on land as well as on the water? and more. Topics include: straight-line navigation, getting around obstacles, uploading maps and databases, entering waypoints, recording a breadcrumb trail, how to choose a GPS model and caring for your GPS. The step-by-step instructions are accompanied by illustrations and photographs. Actual GPS screens are shown as the user sees them on his or her unit while navigating. In addition to a glossary of GPS terms and definitions, this book has a list of popular manufacturers, a list of software sources and an Index.