Exercise 1

Getting familiarized with your GPS receiver

This first Exercise is not really about navigation, but about the all important getting familiarized with your GPS receiver. If you did not do so yet, this is probably the right moment to print out the page GPS Settings. We advise to consult this paper every time that you are at the point to go out with your GPS receiver. At least for the first 20 times or so.

A random walk to record the track and some waypoints

In this Exercise we do a random walk, record the track and mark some waypoints at crossings, turns and whatever point you like. After the walk you should be able to show the recorded track and the waypoints on the map-page of your GPS receiver.

We did a 5,62 km walk in open field, but you can perfectly do a walk in your neighborhood and if you do not want to spend too much time at this Exercise or the weather is too bad, you could as well do a small trip in your car.

Your GPS receiver’s manual

It is up to you to figure out with your GPS receiver’s manual how to do the different settings. For us it would be impossible to know for every model of every brand how the different menus are programmed. And even if we knew, we could not write down all that information on this page.

Map extracts

We will show you how we did it with our Garmin GPS76. Let’s start with a map-extract of the location of our walk.

The location of our walk

At the UTM coordinates 31U 639690E 5614420N you see a little blue circle. This represents a high water tower. Behind it is a cemetery, but this has no significance for our Exercise. The high tower is practical as starting point for our trip, as we do not do GPS navigation for this walk. You always have to come back to your car. When during almost the whole walk you can see the tower, choosing a direction is rather simple. This is a kind of navigation, which will always be important, with or without GPS receiver.

The first waypoint

So after putting on our walking boots, we mark a waypoint on our GPS receiver and change the name to "CAR". At every important turn or crossing of trails we do the same. With the GPS76 marking a waypoint goes as follows. Push and hold the "Enter" key. The GPS receiver presents a screen with the actual coordinates and a numeric name, which is the first free number for waypoints. If you push "Enter" again, the waypoint will be registered as such. You can change the name afterwards, if you wish, or you can do it before pushing "Enter" for the second time (which, by default chooses "OK").

GPS map screen

At the end of our walk, back at our car, we had registered the whole track of our walk and 10 waypoints. On the map-screen of our GPS76 (a non-mapping GPS receiver) this looks as in the screen capture below.

The Track and Waypoints as seen on the GPS map page

With the GPS76 it goes as follows. "Main Menu", "Tracks", "Save" to save the points in the track log. The GPS receiver gives it the name of the actual date. Choose that track and press "Enter". On the new screen select "Map". Press "Enter" again and you obtain the above image. You will see the waypoints only if somewhere in the GPS setup you choose "always show nearby waypoints". The screen unveils that we changed the name of waypoint 001 only after the trip into "Car", otherwise waypoint 002 would have been given the name 001.

The following picture shows the track and the waypoints on the map.

Track and Waypoints projected on the map

Some photos of the scene

During our walk we took some pictures of the landscape around us.

Photo of water-tower

Photo 1 shows the water tower (the one at the right), seen from waypoint 009.

This is left of the track

Photo 2 shows what was left of the track from waypoint 009 to waypoint 002.

To Exercise 2

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