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 Overview
The compass on its own is not particularly useful to finding a geocache. Like a normal compass, it tells you what direction you are heading. In the example to the left, we are facing just slight East of South.
What is the big arrow?
You will quickly notice that there is a big orange arrow that sits on top of the compass. This arrow indicates the direction to the cache. In this case, the cache is behind us, and we are heading in the wrong direction.
How does it know which direction I'm heading?
Unlike a classic compass, this compass doesn't really know which direction you are facing. It uses the GPS in the phone to estimate which direction you are heading, but if you stand still and turn around, it will not change. It will not change until you change the direction you are moving. As you move, the GPS will pick up on what direction you are heading, and the compass will respond by showing you that information.
Some phones use a less accurate means of determining the direction you are heading than others, which results in a compass that is more or less accurate. On some phones you will have a compass that is solid and accurate. On some phones you will have a compass that sways from side to side, and some phones will have a fair lag before the heading on the compass catches up to your real heading.
Though we do what we can to work around these short comings, we can't make it perfect. If you find that the compass doesn't work very well on your phone model, please feel free co contact support and let them know. If your compass doesn't work well you will be able to get by with the Radar, and Map pages. For more information, see Using The Maps and Using The Radar.
When I get close to the cache, the big arrow isn't right - why is that?
The arrow that points you to the cache works great from far away, but when you get very close to the cache, the error in your GPS position becomes similar in size to the distance to the cache. This means that the error in the GPS could decide you are north of the cache at one moment and south of it the next. This would result in the arrow pointing one direction at one moment, and the opposite direction the next. For this reason, we advise you to switch to the radar screen when you get close enough to the cache, see Using The Radar for more information.
Other useful items on the compass page
There are other really useful items of information on the compass page:
- speed
- heading
- altitude
- distance to cache
- latitude and longitude
- position accuracy
Some of these items (speed, heading, and altitude) are always shown on the screen. The rest of the items are in the info box at the bottom of the screen. You can scroll through these items with the up and down arrows.
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