NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Test your magnetic compass.
From: John Huth
Date: 2012 Nov 15, 12:37 +0100
From: John Huth
Date: 2012 Nov 15, 12:37 +0100
Here's how I test my handheld compasses - google earth can give you pretty accurate estimates of bearings, certainly to better precision than a magnetic compass.
I take bearings from a known location and then compare these with the bearings from google earth. That's how I got my estimates of +/- 5 degrees with a cheap handheld backpacker compass.
On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 12:30 PM, Byron Franklin <byronink@netzero.com> wrote:
This is part of an old trick to correct magnetic compass on a boat. Head to a buoy, read the compass, add 180 degrees, put buoy on your stern and head away, read the compass, it should be the added 180 this difference gives the amount of compass error. Move magnets or adjust the compass to ½ the found error. See what your compass reads!Byron: Above should have read, This is the amount of deviation of compass error. with no boat this should be very small and perhaps just in your compass.
Let me know what you think.----------------------------------------------------------------
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