Compass help

[wingstoo]

The Silva Type 4 is the recommended choice for mountain leader training. It will take bearings accurate to 2 degrees. As has been said, it is all you need, really.

I have used both over the years, at the end of the day whether degrees or mils it is just a mark on the dial, the smaller/closer the marks that you can work to the more accurate is it is likely to be. If I was walking over open ground at night then I would want it to be really accurate especially if it was not easy or possible to see far enough forward to have an aiming mark.

The surplus military ones are tritium lit and cheaper but you need to be comfortable working with mils. OS maps quote variation in mils as well as degrees, but foreign maps and charts may not.

A simple mathematical calculation shouldn't be beyond most people

1 ° = 17.777777777778 mil

1 mil = 0.05625 °

 

[santaman2000]

The Silva Type 4 is the recommended choice for mountain leader training. It will take bearings accurate to 2 degrees. As has been said, it is all you need, really. The surplus military ones are tritium lit and cheaper but you need to be comfortable working with mils......

I suppose that depends on which military compass you choose. The US military compass by Cammenga is marked in BOTH mils and degrees (our military teaches both and generally only uses mils to direct artillery) It also comes in bot tritium and no tritium which affects the price (the tritium is probably more expensive than the Silva at prices ranging from $59 and up)

 

[malcolmc]

I’ve used the US Army Cammenga type (http://www.cammenga.com/product_p/3h.htm ) for the last five years and been impressed with it; the inductive damping is very good. I use it in conjuction with a Garford metric romer (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Garford-Metric-Map-Romer-set/dp/B006BTQKC6 for image - they are cheaper in map shops – I got mine from Stanfords in Long Acre (London) but they don’t list them on their current web site so they may have droped the line). I'm quite expert at breaking baseplate types . But it depends on the type of competition, if you have to run the thumb type would be hard to beat.

 

[forrestdweller]

in europe i used an NVA-compass which i got brandnew for an absolute bargain from a fleamarket, but unfortunately it does'nt work on the southern hemisphere... .
when i left europe behind i bought a recta- compass (the one which can be used worldwide; i think it's a now-discontinued model). like most things ""made in swiss"" i'm NOT 100% satisfied with it- for some time it developed an airbubble (looking at the product-review section of the website of the shop where i bought it it seems that i'm not the only customer whith this issue and that recta does'nt consider it a problem... . i do!) which has disappeared again by now... . apart from that it worked fine for me!

 

[bigbear]

Agree with the folks who say type 54, a prismatic is emphatically not needed for ML standard nav, it's really more about technique and lots of practice. Saying that I have both types and do like using the prismatic from time to time, but get the method right and you can do it with pretty much any baseplate model to a high degree of accuracy.

 

[torc]

The Silva Type 4 is the recommended choice for mountain leader training. It will take bearings accurate to 2 degrees. As has been said, it is all you need, really. The surplus military ones are tritium lit and cheaper but you need to be comfortable working with mils. OS maps quote variation in mils as well as degrees, but foreign maps and charts may not.

Then there are the Silva mirror-lid sighting compasses like the Type 15. Extra expense, extra weight, and only slightly more accurate bearings. But the folding lid protects the compass capsule, and a mirror could be handy in the wilds (heliograph, removing ocular foreign bodies, shaving).

I use a Silva Type 54, which is identical to the Type 4 except for the prismatic sighting system accurate to half a degree. The prism bit sticks up above the capsule so it might be more fragile, but I'm on my second one (lost the first, somewhere round Hellvellyn) and have never broken one. You do get very accurate bearings and the limiting factor for accuracy is using it as a protractor. When doing resection you definitely get a smaller trangle of error using the optical system. It weighs barely more than the Type 4.

The military use heavy robust prismatic compasses in conjunction with an RA protractor. Not worth the weight, expense and awkwardness in my view. You probably get a very slight accuracy advantage over the Type 54, due to the larger compass card and bigger protractor.

If you like navigation (and I do), then forget the expense and get a Type 54, perhaps with a large separate protractor for real precision. A good game is to do a resection with it and compare the result to the GPS. You can surprise yourself by how good the method works. But of course, resection is an elegnt but not really useful technique - if you can identify three landmarks, you alreadyknow where you are. The time you really need a compass is in clag, or the dark, or dense forest. And there a Type 4 (or the cheaper Type 3) will do everything needed

+1 here Doc.
The Type 54 is a class piece of work but the Type 4 has just about every thing needed of a non-prismatic.
A prismatic is no use in the dark when bearings for a resection can't be got but for precision at a reasonable price the T54 is hard to beat.
Being able to understand what you are seeing on the map and comparing it to lay of the land and vis a versa is paramount, proper map reading skills will allow you to recognise where you are.
Happy trails...torc.

 

[sandbender]

+1 here Doc....Being able to understand what you are seeing on the map and comparing it to lay of the land and vis a versa is paramount, proper map reading skills will allow you to recognise where you are..."

+1 to both torc and Doc.

Map reading and navigation are key skills for being out and about, however they don't seem to be as popular as they should be.

Five minutes in front of youtube provides this list of results...

map reading - 319,000 results
navigation resection - 4390 results
navigation take a bearing - 5790 results
map reading declination - 1860 results

survival - 18,700,000 results
survival knife - 607,000 results
survival kit - 653,000 results