Difference between revisions of "Coordinates"

Revision as of 16:37, 24 December 2005

A set of coordinates

Coordinates are a pair of numbers, Latitude and Longitude, used to define a location.

There are three commonly used formats for coordinates:

DDD° MM.mmm' - Degrees and decimal minutes - used in geocaching
DDD° MM'SS" - Degrees, minutes and seconds - used in general naviation, particularly nautical navigation
UTM - Universal Transverse Mercator - UTM would be a better system to use for geocaching, because it's more accurate and, being based on the metric system, it's better suited to terrestial applications. However, even though geocaching.com lists UTM as well as Lat/Lon, very few cachers or waypoint management programs seem to use it.

Coordinates are based on a datum. Geocache listings use the WGS84 datum, and your GPS needs to be set to this.

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 [[Image:Coordinates.jpg|thumb|right|300px|A set of coordinates]]
-[[Coordinates]] are a pair of numbers used to define a location.
+[[Coordinates]] are a pair of numbers, [[Latitude]] and [[Longitude]], used to define a location.
-[[Geocaching]] uses coordinates of [[Latitude]] and [[Longitude]] (Lat/Lon) to describe the location of the [[cache]] or its  [[waypoint]]s.
 ==Format==
 There are three commonly used formats for [[coordinates]]: