Map and Compass Land Navigation
Getting to a place you have never stood, across ground you cannot see, with a piece of paper and a needle — and knowing, the whole way, whether you are still right.
Course Overview, One Page
A single printable page covering what NAV-02 teaches, the eight 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
NAV-01 taught you to say where something is. That is half a skill. The other half is standing at a road junction in the dark with a grid written on the back of your hand, and having to close the distance to it.
Most people, asked to do that, will pull out a phone. That works until it does not, and the list of ways it stops working is longer than people expect: a dead battery, no signal in a valley, a cracked screen, a drowned handset, a jammed or spoofed signal, or a receiver that is working perfectly and confidently reporting a position two hundred meters from where you are actually standing because nobody ever checked its datum against the map.
The failure mode that matters is not losing the device. It is trusting it after it has quietly become wrong. A person with no other method has no way to notice. A person who can shoot an azimuth, count a distance, and look at the shape of the ground has three independent ways to notice, and will catch the error inside a hundred meters.
This course teaches the method that does not need a battery, and it teaches it as a discipline rather than a party trick. You will plan a route on paper, walk it, and know at every leg whether you are where the plan says you are — and if you are not, how to find out where you actually are and carry on.
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:
- Shoot and follow an accurate azimuth with a lensatic compass, in daylight and in darkness, and convert between the grid azimuth you measure on a map and the magnetic azimuth you actually walk — in both directions, without looking up which way the arithmetic goes.
- Know how far you have gone without being told, using a pace count you have established on your own ground and corrected for slope, load, vegetation and fatigue, cross-checked against elapsed time.
- Plan and walk a multi-leg route on paper, using steering marks, handrails, catching features and attack points, and get around an obstacle without losing your line or your distance.
- Work out where you are when you do not know, by resection from two or three identifiable features, and produce an MGRS grid for that position that someone else can act on.
- Build a route card and run a movement from it at night, including what to do when the compass is the only instrument left and when it is gone too.
Where This Fits
NAV-02 is the second course in the Navigation series and assumes NAV-01 throughout. NAV-01 answers where is it; NAV-02 answers how do I get there, and how do I know I still am. Between them they cover movement for anyone in your family, your group, or your Mutual Assistance Group (MAG) who may have to travel on foot without infrastructure — to a rally point, to a linkup, to a cache, or simply home. Courses elsewhere in the curriculum that assume a group can move to a named location on a schedule are assuming this course.
Lessons 01–08
Each lesson ends with knowledge checks that must be answered correctly before the next lesson opens. Work them in order — each one is built on the one before it.
Lesson 01
The Compass in Your Hand
The lensatic compass part by part, and the two ways to hold it that actually produce a repeatable reading — center-hold and compass-to-cheek. Reading an azimuth, working the bezel by feel in the dark, and how far you have to stand from a rifle, a vehicle or a set of power lines before the needle tells you the truth. Opens with a short exercise about your own ground that Lesson 08 comes back to.
Lesson 02
Three Norths and the G-M Angle
Why there are three different norths, which one your map uses, which one your compass uses, and what the angle between them costs you if you ignore it. Converting a grid azimuth to a magnetic one and back again, in both directions, until it is automatic. Back azimuths, and the specific error that puts a person exactly 180 degrees wrong and confident.
Lesson 03
Orienting the Map to the Ground
The step almost everyone skips. Lining the map up with the world in front of you, by compass and by terrain, so that left on the paper is left on the ground. Why an unoriented map produces confident, fluent, entirely wrong navigation, and why every leg of every route starts here.
Lesson 04
Measuring What You Walk
Establishing your own pace count over a measured distance, then finding out what it does on a slope, under a load, through brush, tired, and in the dark — because it changes under all five and the number you learned on a flat track is not the number you will need. Keeping the tally, and using elapsed time as the independent cross-check.
Lesson 05
Dead Reckoning
Building a route as a series of legs, each one an azimuth and a distance. Picking steering marks so you are not walking with your eyes on the compass. Getting around a pond, a fence line or a cliff without losing the leg — boxing the obstacle and offsetting deliberately — and keeping a written log honest enough to reconstruct where you went wrong.
Lesson 06
Moving by Terrain
The other method, and usually the better one. Handrails you can follow, catching features that tell you when you have gone too far, and attack points that get you close enough to find something small. Choosing a route by the going rather than the straight line, and knowing which method — terrain or dead reckoning — the ground in front of you actually rewards.
Lesson 07
Fixing Your Position
What to do when you do not know where you are. Resection from two or three features you can see and identify, the modified version when you have a linear feature to work from, intersection for plotting something you can see but cannot reach, and polar coordinates. Ends by turning the fix into an MGRS grid, which is where NAV-01 came in.
Lesson 08
Planning and Running the Move
Putting it together on your own ground. Building a route card someone else could follow, running a leg at night, and working the degraded cases — reduced visibility, a route that has changed since the map was printed, and finding direction with no compass at all. Ends by returning to the exercise from Lesson 01.
How This Course Works
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Format | Eight self-paced online lessons, delivered in sequence. Each runs roughly 15 to 30 minutes of reading, plus the field work, which takes considerably longer and is the part that matters. |
| Progression | Lessons unlock in order. Every lesson ends with knowledge checks, and all of them have to be answered correctly before the next lesson becomes available. Your progress is stored in the browser you are studying in. |
| Prerequisites | NAV-01, Grid Coordinates and Map Reading. This course assumes you can already read a map margin, interpret contours, and produce and plot an MGRS grid. If any of that is unfamiliar, start there instead — nothing here will land without it. |
| What you need | A lensatic compass — a real one, not a keyring button and not a phone application. A paper topographic map of the ground you actually live on, a protractor or coordinate scale matched to that map’s scale, a pencil, a notebook, and a measured distance you can walk repeatedly. maptools.com lists tools by scale and publishes free printable protractors and compass roses. Lessons 04, 05, 06 and 08 are field lessons. |
| Ground | Somewhere you can legally and safely walk several hundred meters off a road, ideally with some variation in slope and cover. A large park will do for Lesson 04. Lessons 05 onward want more. |
| Total time | Approximately three to four hours of instruction, plus field work that will run considerably longer — realistically two or three separate outings, one of them after dark. |
| Access | Requires an active Patreon subscription. Lessons are gated; the course map page below is your route in and your route back to any lesson you have already finished. |
One Standing Rule
This course cannot be completed in a chair. Every skill in it is a motor skill wearing a technical explanation — a pace count you have not walked is a number you read once, and an azimuth you have not followed across real ground is a sentence you agreed with. Read the lesson, then go outside and do the thing, on your own ground, before you move on. The lessons are written on that assumption and the knowledge checks are written for someone who has.
A Note on Devices
This is not an anti-technology course. A handheld receiver is a genuinely excellent tool and NAV-01 Lesson 06 covers setting one up properly. The argument here is narrower: a navigator with only one method cannot audit that method. Everything taught in this course is also what lets you catch a device when it is wrong, which is the situation in which people actually get hurt.
Opens the course map, where you can begin Lesson 01 or return to any lesson you have already completed.
Semper Paratus, Semper Gumby