Navigation Formats

Unfortunately you will have to learn. UTM is slightly less accurate as it makes a the round earth flat. I'm talking centimetres.... However UTM is so, so, so much more simple but not recognised world wide.
Lat long is recognised by every body every where so you'll find it appears in most print mediums.
Lat long is not hard to learn, same principles, you just can't define any one number as a particular distance.
Robert Pepper has two great books on navigation.

Dan

Chris
UTM, with its 6 degree zones, false origins for each zone, and non-unique coordinate values (unless a zone number is appended), is a relatively complex system so if you can understand that you will have little trouble with lat/long.

The UTM projection/coord system, which is recognised worldwide and used in many countries for 'large scale' (eg 1:100,000) topo mapping, is great for a range of applications but for simple navigation it is overkill. UTM GRID coords are easily read off many maps because the UTM grid is plotted at close intervals (1km on 100K maps), whereas on most maps very few lines of latitude and longitude (known as the 'graticule') are plotted. If, for example every 1' of latitude and longitude was plotted on a map then it would be simple to read off the lat/long coords fairly accurately.

By the way, if the Moon book uses the standard Australian datum (GDA94 or its equivalent WGS84) then the lats and longs in the book will be the same as the lats and longs on your modern topo maps (and will be very close even if your topo maps are based on the AGD66/84 datum).

In answer to your last question, yes you will need more than one topo map for the Cape. At the 1:250,000 scale maps, there are 14 maps to cover the Cape from Cooktown north, though you would probably not use all of these (only a few if you just restrict yourself to maps covering the CREB and OTL tracks). What you need is a guide to topographic maps, so you can see which ones you really want, or alternatively a PC etc with a mapping program.

Cheers, John

UTM is great Chris as it reads out in meters and is the only system where you have a chance of working out distances on the fly - hence we always put eveything in that format if it isn't already.

Whats worth doing is to practise using a program or your GPS to change co-ords settings quickly, i.e. we download plots etc , change settings , and in an instant they are all changed.

A significant issue with lat/long is that different sources use different lat\long
i.e. some use minutes and seconds and others use decimal minutes , some even give the lat/long as decimal degrees.

Seen lots of errors caused by this use , so reccomend just convert all to UTM and aviod confusion.

Thanks everyone for your input. At present, I don't have a fancy GPS, just a B&W handheld one which pretty much just gives me a the co-ordinates for where I am standing. I then use my compass, pencil and ruler to make sure I am still on the road/track/area, that I think I am.
I think I will learn the lat/long stuff, as it's seems to be commonly used, and from comments here I think it would be an advantage to know both.
Perhaps I should also invest in something like a Hema Navigator, so I can tell at a glance whether I am on the correct road or not....

Cheers Tanka.

There's an online converter here:

http://home.hiwaay.net/~taylorc/toolbox/geography/geoutm.html

and formulae available for Excel etc.

My GPS can display UTM as well as Lat/lon in 3 formats, so I've always assumed I could switch for any diff format coords I wanted to enter manually and then return to the normal position format.