Navigation The X Box Exercise

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The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

yes I wanted to share with you real quick an exercise that you can use for basic navigation skills something that I use out here at the Pathfinder school to help people understand things like lateral drift pace counting and to kind of verify what they have learned and I call this the Xbox exercise what you're going to do is all you really need is a compass has set of pacing beads and some type of markers about four of them you could use a small soccer cone you could use a stake that you've painted the top of orange you could use flagging tape on stakes you could use bandanas shemagh whatever you want to use but you don't want to make it too utterly obvious because you're going to keep this close to the ground all right start off by picking a start point so let's say it's here and I'll tell you how I do this at the school I heard the pop under school because I do I throw a little thing in there on purpose but you're going to take an azimuth and you're going to walk it 100 metres so whatever your pace count is for that hundred metres they're going to walk a hundred metres and you're gonna have a stake in the ground here and a stake in the ground here again you don't want this thing too high you don't want it obvious you want it pretty low so your pace counter that azimuth to 100 meters and now you're going to take your compass just like you're boxing an object and you're going to do a 90 degree turn and exact 90 degrees on your compass and you're going to go another hundred meters and you're going to stick a stake in the ground I do this at the Pathfinder school so that this is flat ground this is flat ground this is uphill and this is downhill you'll see why I do that in a minute then you're going to take another 90 degree bearing going the other direction again like boxing an object and walk a hundred meters and make another tag at that point you should be able to do one more 90 and if you walk 100 meters by your pace count and your Asmus are correct

you should land at your very first point so that's part one now is where things get complicated now we're going to start from right here and we're going to take the azmuth that was right here and we would have written this down as we went and we're going to move our compass exactly 45 degrees from that azmuth which is going to put us on an azmuth here and we're going to start walking and understanding approximate distances will help us number one not to overshoot an object it will give us kind of a backstop that's not there if we have some kind of a distance and to figure out this distance approximately you can take one leg which is a hundred meters and you can times it by one point four one four it's almost one point five if you round it off so you're talking about 150 meters ish so if I start walking this azmuth line and I pace count past 150 meters I probably missed the mark but that's going to tell me number one how accurate I am at taking bearings how accurate my pace counting is and also it's going to check my lateral drift in more ways than one it's gonna check your lateral drift even on flat ground but if now this was uphill and this is downhill that means you're walking side Hill that's really going to jack up your lateral drift so now you're really gonna have to follow your compass otherwise you're going to end up drifting downhill alright if you did that the opposite direction you end up drifting downhill now the next thing to do is take this when you get to this point and you find it figure out your reverse asmath take the amount of paces that you counted here and divide that X by two and that will give you the length here in paces dividing it by two will give you the halfway point of the of this box

at that point you should be able to go back halfway and stop turn 90 degrees and shoot an azimuth this direction or this direction and go half the amount of paces again and you should hit this or this with no lateral drift that's why I call this the Xbox you can't run that a lot of different ways to check both your quality of the Asmus that you're shooting your pace counting as well as your lateral drift and it doesn't have to be real far a hundred meters is really far enough 200 meters would be better but most people don't have that kind of room but even a city park or a ball field an open field of some kind of school anything like that you can do an exercise like this with your friends with your family or by yourself to do a lot of verification of how well you do with this compass if you don't have a map