Navigation with Map and Compass

Introduction:
This activity was the second part of a two week demo on field navigation. Last week we constructed our navigation maps and focused on the coordinate systems and grid strategy, this week we got to actually go out in the field to test out our navigation skills. We had the same groups as before and as a class we met in the parking lot at the Priory so we could go over some details on how the mission was suppose to be carried out. The task at hand was to navigate using our map and a compass to 5 different points within the Priory. We were given a GPS so it could track our movement as well as the coordinates to each of the points so we could plot those points on our map before heading out.

Study Area:
As described in the previous lab, the Priory is a piece of property owned by the university foundation located south of town (Figure 1). We got to the Priory at 3pm and left just before 6pm after the whole class returned from the wilderness of the Priory. It was cloudy out with winds out of the East at about 5mph with the temperature at 50 degrees Fahrenheit. One thing to note is that the priory is mostly wooded terrain and as we all know that could cause trouble for our GPSs but luckily for us, the leaves have mostly fallen by now. This gives us the optimal time to check out navigation maps and plotted points against the actual coordinates that we were given. My group was group number one and we were given five points with the coordinates in UTM (Figure 2).

Figure 1: Location of the Priory relative to our university campus

Figure 2: Map showing the five points that we were tasked to navigating to

Methods:
Our methods were pretty straight forward, we were given a compass, Garmin Etrex GPS, and a 11x17 printed out version of our navigation maps that were constructed a week prior to this activity. The only other thing we received was some instruction on the compass and our coordinates in the format shown below in Figure 3.

Figure 3:  A snapshot of our coordinates in UTM

We then took the above coordinates and plotted them on our map using the grid system that I created. Once the points were plotted we were able to take our compass and determine the azimuth from our starting location to our end location. We wrote down the azimuth in degrees as well as the distance from one point to the other so we knew how far we needed to pace. Evan was our pace counter and his 100 meter pace count was 61 steps. Using this we took however long the distance was from point to point and then used that number as a percentage and multiplied it by .61 so we got the correct number of steps that Evan had to pace off when walking through the brush. With all of this information in hand we set out to look for our first point. Evan was the pace counter, Grant was the leap frogger, and I was the azimuth control. I told Evan where to go and how many total paces he needed to walk and he walked to the furthest point that we could tell was still in line. We needed to stay as straight as possible from the start point to the end point and having three people made that easier than if there was only one or two of us. This process was repeated every time we reached our plotted point.

Results:
This is a great time to transition into our results. I just stated that our process was repeated every time we reached a point. Well the catch is that we never reached any of our points. Out of the five points that we had to find we navigated to none of them, however after we threw in towel and decided to head back to the parking lot, we randomly stumbled upon our second point. While at this point we took out the GPS and marked the coordinates in UTM according to the GPS so we could compare them to the coordinates that we received prior to the start of the lab. Figure 4 shows the GPS/UTM coordinates right next to our point and then if you look just above the GPS coordinates you will see the coordinates that we received prior to the start of the lab.

Figure 4: Comparison of the GPS coordinates of Point 2 to the coordinates we received at the beginning of the lab 

You can see from Figure 4 that the actual coordinates of the location are quite off. The point is acutally of 10 meters to the West and 32 meters to the South. Even though this may not seem significant, the purpose of this activity isn't to be 100% accurate and walk exactly to the tree marker. Many other groups got close enough and just saw the tree marker in their general region, but when you can only see <10 meters in any direction, being that far off can really screw with you. We were told that not all of the markers may still be there because they could have gotten torn down, but the problem is once you don't find a point, it is hard to move onto the next point because now you don't have an exact starting point anymore. Yes you could look at the GPS and replot your position but it doesn't matter if the end points are not in the general area they are suppose to be in.  Figure 5 below shows our groups path through the property and where the points are that we were suppose to find according to the coordinates given. I also added a point where the actual location of Point 2 was so we could compare how far off the points were.

Figure 5: Map showing the path that our group took to navigate towards all the different points. You can tell that we got right on top of Point #2 but still didn't find it until we randomly walked upon it as shown by the bright green dot.



You can see from the Figure above that we didn't even come close to locating three of the five points. That is because we were still stuck on figuring out how to find the second point. When we arrived at the location of where we thought point one was going to be located we assumed that the marker just wasn't there and that it was torn down, but we were fairly certain that we were in the right location so we just moved on to the second point for the sake of time. When pacing out the second point we came to the end of our pace count and saw that once again there was no marker to be found. This is when we tried to use the GPS to walk to the coordinates of our second point as described by the coordinates we received on paper. This failed miserably as we just got turned around and around, never actually finding the marker, even though according to the GPS, we were right where we needed to be. This caused us a lot of frustration and we said that we were just going to return to the parking lot where we would regroup with everyone so we could try and figure out the problem. It is now when we stumbled upon a random tree with a marker on it that to our surprise was labeled 1:2 which stands for Group 1 Point 2.  This was the perfect ending to a roundabout evening that we just had trying to find point 2, luckily we did or else we would not have gotten the data that we did and we wouldn't have been able to compare the coordinates.

Discussion/Conclusion
A previous class was tasked to finding and marking the location of the tree markers and it seems as though they failed miserably. This activity was purposeful and I got the gist out of it, but it was troublesome and very aggravating because no matter what we did, we were just walking blind because the coordinates of our target locations were incorrect. This made for a very poor representation of how we can navigate according to Figure 5, however we walked out of this activity with a very good understanding of how to navigate and really that is what matters. We had to troubleshoot and critically think why this activity wasn't working and in doing so, we got a lot of practice with azimuth control as well as map interpretation. This made the activity very worthwhile because we learned that not everything is in the right location and even though you may be doing everything right whens it comes to navigating, you could be completely lost, which is what we were.