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How To Read A Compass
By Alan Leach
Knowing how to read a compass is not only a useful skill, if you are ever stuck in the wilderness it could just be the difference between life and death! Too dramatic? Well, perhaps, but the point is that knowing how to read a compass is important for anyone spending any time in the great outdoors. While you read the advice that follows about how to read a compass, it helps to have a compass with you. If not, you can always draw a circle on a piece of paper or use your watch instead (but not a digital watch!).
Most compasses share the same basic characteristics, even though some may have more features than others. The simple compass looks a little like a watch, though it only has one hand with two arrows pointing in opposite directions. The first and perhaps most important thing to remember when learning how to read a compass is that this arrow always points in a north-south direction. To find out how to read which arrow is pointing north is sometimes a little more difficult, but usually if the arrow is painted in red, or is a little more fancily designed than the opposite arrow, this is north. In some compasses it is even easier, as one of the arrows has a small ‘n' for north written on it.
If you know where north and south is, you also know how to read east and west. Imagine a clock face with 12 O'clock as north and 6 O'clock as south. 3 O'clock is east and 9 O'clock is west. An easy way to learn this is to remember the acronym ‘NEWS' as if you start at 12 O'clock on your watch and go clockwise, you get north, east, south and finally west.
Knowing all this, if for example you wanted to travel east, all you need to do is make sure the red arrow is lined up with north on the compass. You should be able to read an ‘E' for east on the compass. All you need to do is go in the direction that the ‘E' points to. A word of warning here for those of you wanting to know how to read a compass. East on the compass (or north, south or west) will not be exactly the same as east on the map. This is because the compass works by pointing to magnetic north, which is not exactly the same as true north. The further north you travel, the bigger this discrepancy becomes. Even so, a compass will give you a general idea of how to get to a certain point using this technique.
As well as these main points, those of you wanting to know how to read a compass will also need to know how to read points that are not exactly north, south, east or west. Your compass makes this easy for you by dividing the compass face into degrees, from 0 to 360. You can see that 90 degrees is east and 270 degrees is west, but how about the point directly in the middle of north and west? This is known as North West and you should be able to read from your compass it is at 315 degrees. The same applies to all the other points of the compass too.
In summary, if you want to know how to read a compass, you must know how to find north. If you understand that north is represented by the red arrow, and you know where you are now, it should be fairly easy to find how to get to any other place that is marked on the map.
See Also:
More info on how to read a compass
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