Utility Items for your Compass

What sparkled this article was a series of videos by Dave Canterbury on other than navigation uses of a compass.

So, in the 3^rd video of the series “No Map No Problem Part 3 Height and Distance”, he shows how to calculate height with the use of the clinometer in his compass and a table of slope values printed on his compass cover.

His compass is the Kasper & Richter Alpin Compass. With the purpose of copyig this table we Googled images in the web. And we got to this review and this video review of the compass.

But we took a step further than this,

What Dave Canterbury does is to use basic trigonometry for calculating length and height. So, in trigonometry one can calculate all the triangle dimensions and angles if he knows the length of one side and two angles or the length of two sides and one angle. And calculations can be further expanded by knowing the sine, cosine and tangent values of an angle.

So we got online, picked up a table with these values and transferred the values of every 5 degree angles on a table. In between values can be easily approximated.

 As you may have noticed, % Slope is 100 times the value of the tangent.

And while on it here are the rest of the items we keep with our compass.

A compass guide, some paper, a DIY protractor (not shown), half a pencil and a keychain light for low light and for “charging” our compasses self-luminus markings

In the end, one just has to think outside the box to make such calculations, or be shown the first time.