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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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