GPS and lat lon

[Fran49829]

I ran into a guy a few years ago who was making a simple mistake when entering published latitude longitude coordinates into his gps and want to bring it up here in case anyone else is doing the same thing. Let''s say the published location of a place includes 45 degrees 37 minutes 50 seconds (45 37'' 50"). This guy was entering it into his gps as 4537.500 which of course is incorrect because the 50" means 50/60 which is .833 so he should have put 4537.833 into his gps.

[clayton]

I disagree! Most gps units will convert degrees, minutes and seconds. Or, are you just pulling our collective legs?

[Fran49829]

No, I am not pulling your leg at all. I believe I am very correct on this.

[928frenzy]

My Garmin can provide the Lat Lon in degrees, minutes, seconds, and hundreths of seconds. All that is needed is to set it up at the "Preference" page.

Happy sails to you.

[paulk]

GIGO. (Garbage In, Garbage Out) If your system''s preferences are set up to perform an operation, it will perform the operation. It won''t care if you enter 30 (seconds) or .5 (minutes), it will take the number and do its thing. If you''ve had enough sleep, you''ll notice that the results look screwy for one or the other (depending upon how you generally operate and how you generally enter numbers- which is why you set the preferences the way you did) and correct your mistaken entry.

[Fran49829]

Once again, 50 seconds does not equal .500 and if your gps is set up to work on hundreths for the seconds and you enter .500 for 50 seconds the position is plain wrong.

On another note I have a Garmin 48 that is operating with the seconds as a part of 100 and cannot find the preference page where I can change the seconds to part of 60. Can anyone help walk me through it?

It seems my Garmin48 reads out in degrees and minutes with no seconds such as 45 degrees 37.833 minutes (4537.833).

[928frenzy]

On my Garmin, to change the position read out all I need do is: go th the menu page that shows "setup". Enter "setup", then click over to "Position". Enter "Position", then select any of the 12 format that you like.

In my case, all of my charts and tables are in degrees, minutes seconds and teths of a second. Thus I set the Garmin to show my home lat as N38(degrees)57''39.9 seconds.

~ Happy sails to you ~

[Fran49829]

Thank you. I went to "setup menu" and then to "navigation" where at the top of the page was "position frmt" where I can select "degrees, minutes, seconds and tenths of seconds" or "degrees, minutes, and thousandths of a minute".