{"id":85,"date":"2006-01-01T16:41:59","date_gmt":"2006-01-01T21:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sdxa.org\/?p=85"},"modified":"2019-01-09T14:11:33","modified_gmt":"2019-01-09T22:11:33","slug":"setting-your-beam-direction-indicator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sdxa.org\/?p=85","title":{"rendered":"Setting Your Beam Direction Indicator – by Dan, N5AR"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recent post to Tower Talk gave an excellent route for finding your magnetic declination. It also gives your latitude and longitude in decimal notation which I like. <\/p>\n

Go to this location:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.ngdc.noaa.gov\/geomagmodels\/Declination.jsp<\/a><\/p>\n

Click enter your Zip Code at Get Location<\/strong>.\u009d
\nClick Compute Declination<\/strong>.\u009d <\/p>\n

or enter your Latitude and Longitude <\/strong>in the Enter Location<\/strong> for a more precise location.
\nClick Compute Declination<\/strong>.\u009d <\/p>\n

This, with your compass reading, will give you true north once you subtract the declination from the compass reading to get true headings.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are other ways to find true north. You can use the North Star or you can use my favorite method as follows. <\/p>\n

Look in the newspaper for the times of sun up and sun down. Calculate the hours and minutes between. Divide this by 2 and that is the time of exact noon. At that time, look at the shadow of your tower or a vertical post and the shadow points to true north.<\/p>\n

73, Dan, N5AR
\nJan 1, 2006<\/p>\n

Comments from Steve K7AWB Webmaster:
\nI did both ways. I entered my Zip Code and calculated; and then I entered my Latitude and Longitude from my GPS and recalculated. Both gave the same declination of 16 degrees 23 minutes East. Years ago, I marked true North at my house by finding the North Star at night. I saw that it was directly over my neighbors front door when I stand at the upper right corner of my front steps, with my feet together. So I can find true North in the daytime. hi hi <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Compass North is not true North!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdxa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdxa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdxa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdxa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdxa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sdxa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11469,"href":"https:\/\/sdxa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/11469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdxa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdxa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdxa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}