Okay, after 3 years I have not been able to calibrate the compass on my CS20. It actually has not been that big of a deal since I have rarely had the occasion to find it useful, until now. I need to shot a point on a couple of hundred building faces. Since I have not been successful in the calibration I decided to play with the hidden point routine 'Bearing & Distance' using a handheld compass to provide the bearing. Funny thing I found out is that no matter what declination I entered in the regional settings, I get the same results. Obviously the declination is not used by the app.
This has got me wondering, how does the internal compass account for declination? Given how susceptible to magnetic interference it seems to be, it must be magnetic. If you are lucky enough to mastered the art of calibrating your compass, how are you accounting for declination?
Thanks in advance
I was working on reestablishing a property line when my client whipped out his cell phone after we set the first point.?ÿ He used a compass app that he held over the point before I could pick up and set there and pointed in the magnetic direction of the bearing on the tract map.?ÿ He started ranting and raving at the neighbor to move his shed before I could tell him the magnetic declination, which he never heard of, was 16?ø east, more than enough to make the shed on the neighbor's property.?ÿ Sometimes you work for the jerk.
That's nothing. I've got a developer who paid out a 25 lot subdivision 20 degrees off. He tried to blame it on Iron Mountain. He also didn't know about horizontal measuring. It's a huge mess now.
My dealer jokingly (with a hint of seriousness) said they guarantee the compass to be accurate to within 180 degrees.... so that has led me to never use the hidden point feature. That's a bummer, because it has the potential to be really useful - but not if you can't trust the results.