My brother E-5 Sergeant in the US army spends most of his time in a Bradley attack vehicles (small fast moving tank) and the Hummers.Says that the gps provided by the Army has an accuracy of 2 meters.

----- Original Message -----
From: Team Tierra Buena
Sent: Friday, January 31, 2003 6:24 AM
To: az-geocaching@listserv.azgeocaching.com
Subject: [Az-Geocaching] GPS in the Army

In an insomniac bout last night, I surfed into the Discovery Channel in the middle of a program about US armed forces in Afghanistan. In one segment they were showing how combat controllers (I think that was what they were called, perhaps it was "forward controllers") perform their duties.

It is their job to provide target coordinates to air strikes.  They do this by sighting on  a target and projecting a waypoint from where they are to the target, which waypoint they then report to the bombers. They showed a picture of a bazillion-dollar mil-spec GPS. Then the narrator stated that the soldiers prefer to use consumer models as they are far lighter and consume batteries much more slowly, while the film showed a soldier using a clearly-labeled Garmin Vista to do the waypoint projection.

I'm not posting this to add ammo to the Garmin-Maggie skirmish here. I just thought it was cool to be watching it and see them using a piece of gear I've got in my backpack.

Steve
Team Tierra Buena