BillK
New member
Greetings,
Can someone please educate me on what some of the best practices are for using your GPS to navigate out of a low-visibility situation? I just recently purchased the NG TOPO software and I do own a Garmin etrex Vista GPS, but I don't have much experience with using either. I've played around with the Garmin Tracback feature, waypoints, etc., but I'm curious as to what others are doing to prepare for a situation where there may be limited visibility, such as on the summit of Washington. I would like to perform a winter hike on some of the northern presidentials, but I'm very concerned about not being able to find my way back due to low visibility. From what I've been able to research, it appears that a common practice is to load various waypoints into your GPS from key locations, and then use the find/goto feature from within the GPS
to navigate to those waypoints. Since I don't yet have a data cable to download the waypoints, I suppose I could get the waypoint coordinates from my topo map, and then manually punch them into my GPS?
Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge and experience on this subject.
Can someone please educate me on what some of the best practices are for using your GPS to navigate out of a low-visibility situation? I just recently purchased the NG TOPO software and I do own a Garmin etrex Vista GPS, but I don't have much experience with using either. I've played around with the Garmin Tracback feature, waypoints, etc., but I'm curious as to what others are doing to prepare for a situation where there may be limited visibility, such as on the summit of Washington. I would like to perform a winter hike on some of the northern presidentials, but I'm very concerned about not being able to find my way back due to low visibility. From what I've been able to research, it appears that a common practice is to load various waypoints into your GPS from key locations, and then use the find/goto feature from within the GPS
to navigate to those waypoints. Since I don't yet have a data cable to download the waypoints, I suppose I could get the waypoint coordinates from my topo map, and then manually punch them into my GPS?
Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge and experience on this subject.