Navigation and Signaling Track · NAV-06
Navigation Using a GPS
The device is faster and more precise than a map, right up until it is neither.
Course Overview, One Page
A single printable page covering what NAV-06 teaches, the ten lessons, what you need before starting, and the doctrinal sources behind the method. Useful for deciding whether the course is for you, or for handing to somebody in your group who is weighing it up.
Why This Course
Most preparedness advice about GPS comes in one of two flavors. Either it is a walkthrough of a particular device’s menus, which stops being true the year that model is discontinued, or it is a flat warning not to trust the thing at all. Neither one survives contact with real ground.
The failure that actually hurts nobody warns you about: a device that is still switched on, still bright, still reporting three meters of accuracy, and wrong. A datum set once and never checked again. A coordinate written in one format and typed into a receiver expecting another. Signals bouncing off a canyon wall and arriving late. Every one of those produces a confident, well-formatted, incorrect position — and none of them announce themselves. The only thing that catches them is a member who treats a fix as a claim and knows how to check it.
- Set any handheld or phone receiver’s datum and coordinate format to match the map in your hand, and state in meters what it costs you when they don’t match.
- Take a position off the device, plot it on paper, and confirm it against the ground before you act on it.
- Apply a decision rule — not a hunch — when the device and the map disagree about where you are.
- Pass a position by radio at the right precision for the task, and read one back without introducing an error.
- Keep moving on map and compass when the signal is degraded, jammed, or gone, without halting to reorganize.
Lessons 01–10
What GPS Is, and How It Fails
How a fix is actually computed, why the accuracy figure is an estimate rather than a guarantee, four conditions that routinely degrade a position, and where the device belongs in a navigation PACE plan.
The Constellations Above You
Four independent global satellite systems, who runs them and why, and the two receiver capabilities people constantly confuse: how many systems it hears, versus how many frequencies it hears them on. Plus SBAS, the satellite-based augmentation setting most owners never actually make a decision about.
Device Selection and Configuration
Handheld, phone, watch, or vehicle unit, and the battery and antenna tradeoffs between them. Then the settings that decide whether a coordinate is usable at all: map datum, coordinate format, north reference, units. You finish with a filled-out settings card that stays with the device.
Core Operations
Entering a written position without transcription error, navigating to it, taking an averaged position for a fixed site, and reading the device’s own accuracy estimate well enough to know when to ignore it.
Routes, Tracks, and Retracing Your Path
Building a route from map recon before you move, naming points so the whole group can read them, recording intervals and the battery cost that comes with them, and why retracing a recorded path is not the same thing as following a planned route.
Integrating GPS With Map and Compass
The core skill of the course. Moving a position from device to paper and back, using the ground itself as the verification layer on every fix, and the decision rule for which one you follow when the two disagree.
Reporting a Position
Feeding positions into a contact report, a situation report, and a medical evacuation request. What six, eight, and ten digits each actually claim, and how to pass one over the radio without an error creeping in.
Device Security and Emissions Control
What the device stores and transmits about you: recorded paths as a pattern-of-life record, geotagged photos, cloud sync, live-share and family-tracking features. How to sanitize a device before and after movement, and when it goes off entirely.
Degraded, Denied, and Dead
Recognizing from the user’s side that a fix has stopped being reliable. Offline mapping, the widespread misconception that phone positioning needs cell service, power management, and the deliberate handoff to map and compass without stopping movement.
Group Standard and Field Exercise
Standardizing datum, format, and naming across the group so positions are portable between members. Then the capstone: load a route, walk it, verify against paper at three checkpoints, report each one, and finish the last leg with the device switched off.
How This Course Works
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Prerequisites | NAV-01 (Grid Coordinates and Military Map Reading) and NAV-02 (Map and Compass Land Navigation). This course assumes you can already read a grid and shoot a bearing; it does not reteach either. |
| Equipment | Any handheld or phone receiver, a paper map of ground you actually use, and a compass. No particular brand or model is required at any point. |
| Device coverage | Procedures are taught as concepts, not as menu paths, so the course does not expire when a model does. Settings paths for common handheld and phone platforms sit in an annex you can update independently. |
| Structure | Ten lessons, each with knowledge checks worked into the reading rather than saved for the end. You unlock the next lesson by answering all of a lesson’s checks correctly. |
| Practical work | Lesson 03 produces a settings card for your device. Lesson 10 produces a written group standard and puts the whole course on the ground in one exercise. |
| Scope | Civilian throughout. The course covers recognizing and responding to degraded or denied conditions. It does not cover interfering with anyone’s satellite navigation, and never will. |
| Background reading | The public reference article The Constellations Above You, linked below. Not required, but the lessons assume you could look things up in it. |
| Access | Patreon subscription required. Lessons are read online; a companion guide with reference tables and blank worksheets is available inside the course. |
The course is built on top of a public FFTP technical reference, The Constellations Above You — a practitioner’s guide to GNSS, coordinate systems and handheld setup. It covers what is overhead, how the gear uses it, why a phone is not the same instrument as a handheld, and the settings that decide whether the numbers on your screen mean anything to the person on the other end of the radio.
It sits outside the paywall on purpose. Read it before you start and the lessons will land faster; read it afterward and it is the reference you keep. It is also the thing to hand somebody in your group who needs the reasoning without taking the course.
The lessons reinforce it rather than repeat it: each one carries the working subset you need on the ground, and points back to the article for the full treatment.
Opens the NAV-06 course map, where you pick up wherever you left off.
Fortune Favors the Prepared
Semper Paratus, Semper Gumby
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