NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: UTM to geod. lat/lon conversion
From: Jared Sherman
Date: 2003 Dec 11, 17:42 -0500
From: Jared Sherman
Date: 2003 Dec 11, 17:42 -0500
My understanding (from someone in the US Army) was that UTM's only real purpose was for things like calling in artillery. Two corners of the UTM grid are matched up to more complicated mapping (lat/lon, dd/mm/ss, whatever) and whoever is killing things can deal with simple addition and subtraction on the UTM grid to make their job faster and simpler. And safer, to prevent friendly fire incidents. The need to still go out and reference the corners of a UTM grid to a "better reality" would seem to make it suited only to jobs where the same one local patch is going to be referenced again and again, like an artillery controller would. No?
