Vic303
03-04-2007, 03:31 PM
Button Compass:
It’s small and light, but lacks any way to attach it to anything, short of epoxy. I think if it were slipped in a pocket, the face would rapidly become obscured through scratches to the point of becoming unreadable. It does have a tiny bit of glow paint on it, but it fades so rapidly as to be pointless—you have to charge it with a flashlight (5 sec charge from Fenix L1P) and then it fades within one minute to the point I could no longer read the letters. You can still make out which arrow is N, as it is larger than the other three however.
My next thought was to let the kids play with it, so they could have a compass to experiment with. After all, they are mostly past the “smashing things” stage…and they love to Geocache. However it is so small, it is an ingestion risk with very minor children like mine.
Like most compasses, the button compass is rather sensitive to deflection from external sources—computer monitor, small magnet, other bits of random metal like a knife sheath with knife, etc. The other thing I noted with the button compass is it pointed ‘northerly’ but not north. At least when compared to my Silva and an old BSA compass, it was off by approximately 10deg to the W.
All in all, I found it useful for gross direction finding, but I wouldn’t want to navigate by it. Available at EDCDepot.com for $5.99.
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b353/vic303/IMG_1559.jpg
It’s small and light, but lacks any way to attach it to anything, short of epoxy. I think if it were slipped in a pocket, the face would rapidly become obscured through scratches to the point of becoming unreadable. It does have a tiny bit of glow paint on it, but it fades so rapidly as to be pointless—you have to charge it with a flashlight (5 sec charge from Fenix L1P) and then it fades within one minute to the point I could no longer read the letters. You can still make out which arrow is N, as it is larger than the other three however.
My next thought was to let the kids play with it, so they could have a compass to experiment with. After all, they are mostly past the “smashing things” stage…and they love to Geocache. However it is so small, it is an ingestion risk with very minor children like mine.
Like most compasses, the button compass is rather sensitive to deflection from external sources—computer monitor, small magnet, other bits of random metal like a knife sheath with knife, etc. The other thing I noted with the button compass is it pointed ‘northerly’ but not north. At least when compared to my Silva and an old BSA compass, it was off by approximately 10deg to the W.
All in all, I found it useful for gross direction finding, but I wouldn’t want to navigate by it. Available at EDCDepot.com for $5.99.
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b353/vic303/IMG_1559.jpg