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The
Handheld GPS:
The Detectorist's Friend
I’m a forgetful person. Not dementia-level forgetful, but forgetful
enough that if my head wasn’t attached to my neck, I’d leave home
without as many time as I leave home without my wallet. I dunno
why. It might be stress. It might be because I’ve always been this
way. I’m just happy I’ve never reached my destination and strolled
off with my kids still in the car. Whatever the reason, it’s not
an endearing quality to have when it comes to better metal detecting.
This is why, as far as I’m concerned, the handheld Global Positioning
Satellite (GPS) unit ranks just below the microwave oven and Burger
King as one of mankind’s finest recent inventions. The Russian mail
order bride is a nifty invention, too, but until my wife lets me
have one, I can’t say how far up my list it ought to be.
In a nutshell, a handheld GPS unit, if you’re not familiar with
one, is an electronic device about the size of a mini cassette recorder
and uses a variety of satellites overhead to give you the longitude
and latitude of where you are. If you know the longitude and latitude
of where you’d like to go, it’ll show you how to get there. It’ll
also show you how to get back to your car after you’ve been tromping
around the woods. If Hansel and Gretel had one of these, some nasty
witch wouldn’t have tried to shove them into an oven.
Carmakers have been installing a car-size version of the handheld
GPS into their new models for the past year or so, so it’s a technology
with some serious merit. Especially if it’s a technology that’ll
keep you from having to bolt one of those big boat compasses on
your dashboard, which is pretty much a determining factor that says
you’ve reached the age where, if you need a compass to figure out
where you’re going and you’re not on the open water, well, your
time might be better spent doing something less challenging with
your grandchildren than hurtling down the street in a rolling automobile.
But then again, my grandmother had one of these big boat compasses
bolted to her dashboard, and she still somehow put her car through
the wall of a store in Mountain Home, Arkansas, about 10 years back.
Maybe it was because the Catholic Church retired St. Christopher
as the patron saint of travelers, thereby rendering her dashboard
Christopher inoperative. I dunno.
A GPS unit won’t put you exactly to the inch on the spot you’re
trying to get to, but it’ll put you reasonably close, usually within
50 yards or so. I’m told the military has GPS units that’ll put
you dead on your target, but the CIA isn’t exactly selling them
down at Sam’s Club. So we can only buy the best of what we can afford
among the current crop of GPS units. Which, really, we should be
happy for even in this technology’s relative infancy, because still
and all, even the cheapest GPS available today is a far cry better
than a compass.
Last year, long before I owned a GPS, I began to understand the
worth of these pieces of relatively inexpensive consumer electronics
technology when a detecting acquaintance took me tromping around
a forest preserve in one of Chicago’s near western suburbs. He had
found a number of interesting things, such as old license tags,
dating back to horse and buggy days, so he thought this preserve
would be a fine place to spend a late September afternoon. As it
was, this preserve had been used for decades as the local dumping
ground during the early part of this century.
We had been hunting (although "wandering aimlessly" was
a more adequate phrase to describe what we were doing) deep in the
woods for an hour or two and not finding much of anything other
than large iron trash such as horseshoes, old stove parts and rotted
tin cans, when I came across a large expanse of ground with multiple
signals. A good bit of it was junk (including melted glass dug by
chance from what as a burn pit), but out of the junk also came a
sufficiently worn but nonetheless treasured 1905-O Barber dime.
As I was driving home, I thought about how I would have loved to
be able to mark and find my way back to that same exact spot, except
with both a detector and a sifting box. It was right about then
I’d started finding out about GPS units, and how useful they’ve
started to become to the detecting community. This year, I took
the plunge and bought one. Let me tell you, if you’re highly serious
about detecting or spend a lot of time looking for new sites (especially
out in the woods), it’s one of the best things you could buy.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve got some money to spend on this
hobby. Not a lot of it, but enough so you can have reliable detecting
equipment without looking like a slouch or a miser while still keeping
your family well clothed, fed and sheltered. This means having to
limit ourselves to the Cheap But Really Good aisle of the detecting
candy store until our lottery numbers come in or we figure out a
totally foolproof way to take up financially rewarding careers as
bank robbers. Consequently, I settled on a Garmin GPS 12 which I
bought for about $130 plus shipping through the Amazon.com online
auction from a guy in Seattle who used it once. There are far better
(and far more expensive) GPS units on the market with more features,
but so far, I’ve been really pleased with my admittedly low-dollar
purchase for something that mysteriously picks up digital information
beamed down from satellites hovering around thousands of miles above
our heads. It’s easy to use and, most importantly, it doesn’t spaz
out under a big canopy of trees and tell me I’m traveling east when
I’m actually traveling south.
There are several instances where a GPS unit comes in mighty handy.
The first is where you find a site you want to return to sometime
in the future. There have been times when I’m driving around (usually
miles away from home) and encounter a promising-looking site. Sometimes
these places have no nearby road signs or visual markers, or there
are times when I’m caught short of having a pen and paper in the
car. Because I’m such a forgetful guy, I naturally forget where
these places are if I don’t write down their exact locations. With
a GPS unit, you simply mark the place as a waypoint, and the site
is recorded in the unit’s waypoint list. Being directed to the site
again as a waypoint simply requires pressing a few buttons.
Another instance where a GPS unit works wonders is in conjunction
with digital U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps, which automatically
provide longitude and latitude readings when used with the digital
topo reader. When I find an interesting site, I save it as a waypoint,
which preserves its longitude and latitude. When the time comes
for me to field explore it, my GPS will take me within, I’ve found,
50 feet of it. I get closest if I’m returning to somewhere I’ve
previously searched and marked while in the field.
If you’d like to find out more on using handheld GPS units in conjunction
with digital USGS topo maps, I’ve written a tutorial entitled, "Find
New Sites Using Topographic Maps And U.S. Geological Survey Database
Searches," available for US$10.25 including shipping. You can
find the details at the main page of the Gazette. This is a handy
tutorial to have, since you have to know how to know whether your
GPS is set to the same datum (which provides the proper longitude
and latitude based on how the map was drawn) as your online maps.
My Garmin 12 has a whole shopping list of datums to choose from,
and if I don’t have it set to the same datum as the USGS map I’m
using (and know how to determine which datum was used), I’d probably
end up in Newfoundland.
Most of all, a GPS unit can prove to be a life saver. Literally.
This bit of text is repeated from the section entitled "16
Things (Almost) Every Detectorist Should Pack" in the Quick
Tips section of the Gazette, since it applies:
"Not a necessity for everyone, but it is if you’re a remote
area hunter hours from civilization or the nearest hospital. Although
a GPS’s longitude and latitude readout isn’t precise to the foot,
it’s close enough to pinpoint you for rescuers -- provided, of course,
you’ve brought along a cellular phone to call someone for help in
the first place. If you think a cellular phone is enough without
a GPS, consider this: Directions like, ‘Well, I see a big rock next
to a cactus about a quarter-mile away’ will just leave you waiting
until wolves eat you for supper. For the rest of us, a GPS unit
comes in handy when you come across sites in the woods and you’d
like to find them again. Moreover, a decent model costs about as
much as a handheld electronic pinpointer-coin probe, so they’re
inexpensive enough for most people."
Since I posted that bit of copy long before I purchased a GPS --
and since then have had ample time to discover why they’re so good
to have -- I would amend the preceding paragraph to say handheld
GPS units ARE indeed for everyone if you’re able to afford one.
There was a time just over 10 years ago when I was the managing
editor of a weekly newspaper in Milton, Florida, pulling down the
princely sum of $12,500 a year but still not able to afford telephone
service and decent heat, so I realize even the most dedicated detectorist
may have more pressing things on which to spend their money. It
pretty much depends on how likely you think it is that you’ll fall
into a well, have a heart attack, or break a leg while detecting.
All in all, a handheld GPS unit can be one of your biggest friends,
and the higher entry-level units will do you quite well under most
general-use circumstances. Two of the most popular names in GPS
units are Garmin and Magellan. You can find good starting points
for useful general comparisons between similar Garmin and Magellan
models at http://www.mts.net/geo/independant/blazerg12.htm
and http://www.thegpsstore.com/comp.12-2000xl.htm.
Personal note: If you like the Garmin line and can afford it or
can find one for a bit less than retail on the online auctions,
spring for a Garmin 12XL rather than the Garmin 12. If you can’t
that’s OK, since you’ll still get good performance to suit your
needs from the Garmin 12. You might be able to find better deals
(and have a decent bid accepted) on the Amazon.com auction board
rather than E-bay, since the concept of online auctioning apparently
escapes the majority of E-bay users. I can’t count the number of
times I’ve seen where these dimtwits end up paying much more for
a used item than they would have if they walked into a store and
paid full retail plus local sales tax.
© 1999 Scott Buckner
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