Adventures in Handheld
GPS
When you sell as many Handheld GPS units as we do,
you may begin to figure you've heard it all. Still,
we're constantly amazed at the positive feedback we
get from people who use Garmin® GPS for just about
anything you can imagine. Their adventures range from
meeting personal challenges to surviving life-threatening
situations to saving lives. We hope you'll enjoy their
truly amazing stories of survival, rescue, and human/wildlife
interest using Garmin GPS.
eTrex Summit® goes
to the South Pole
Recently I returned from the U.S. Amundsen-Scott Station,
located at the South Geographic Pole, Antarctica.
This year I took with me my Garmin® eTrex Summit,
and for fun photographed it being held above the south
pole marker.
Because the 4 kilometer-thick ice
(approx. 2.5 miles) beneath the south pole is moving
horizontally about an inch a day, the exact position
of the pole needs to be occasionally remeasured to
determine its current whereabouts on the ice surface.
The US Geological Survey undertakes this job each
Austral summer and places a new pole marker in the
exact current position of the pole on January 1 of
each year.
The photo shows my eTrex Summit
above the January 1, 2001 pole marker. The LCD display
in this image shows a latitude of 89 59' 59.3",
but if one waits at the marker for awhile, you can
occasionally see 90 00' 00.0" flash by
on the screen. But due to an ambient temperature of
-44ûC, this photo was taken in a hurry!
Thanks to Scott Burgett and Frances
Chen for their prompt attention to my query regarding
eTrex Summit's altitude measurement.
Cheers,
Andre
|
