When does it get dangerous

[horsecat]

I'd spend the $30 or so and get a dedicated compass from a hiking shop mate. Much more reliable, plus they have the little measurements printed on them to use on the maps etc. As uninspiring as they can be you shouldn't skimp on the safety items. I've got a compass in an old walking pole and it's out by about 50 degrees. All the other cheap compasses I have had included as freebies etc have been chucked on the tip. Budget, unreliable compasses should be banned from the market! Get a nice quality one, keep it in a pouch with a mapping ruler, pencil and notebook and you're sorted for all your future walks - it won't wear out. In regards to the PLB I wanted to buy one locally rather than source one from overseas. Most hiking shops have one or two in stock and so do some fishing shops (I got mine at a fishing shop (edit: marine shop) in Launceston for about $500). Lasts for nine years after you register it online, and they even send you a new one if the original saves your life. I can give more details on the model and where I got it if need be (all PLB's bought locally would be fine though as I haven't heard that some brands are better than others due to the nature of the product involved). Thankfully I can't advise you of the working performance of my PLB though. I also have a Spot device but these don't have quite the same coverage and need to be registered at $100 per year (useful for bigger expeditions though). Whilst they do have a function that alerts the big yellow taxi in the sky I think a PLB would be the way to go, especially if you have a GPS as you can log your hike with that anyway

[wayno]

marine shops tend to have better prices on plb's

[DanShell]

Yeh we considered a spot tracker many times in the past for our travels purely so our family could watch our progress but the subscription part doesn't sit well with me.

Ill grab a PLB from Tamar Marine or somewhere like that, Im sure they will give me the run down on them. And to think I was telling my wife how our tax returns can just go straight into the dwindling savings account this year as we didn't have any decent sized purchases on the radar in the near future............

As for a compass I gather something like this from PP will be 100 times better than an ebay cheapy?
http://www.paddypallin.com.au/suunto-a-30-compass.html

Thanks for the replies, the layering article was very good and pretty much confirms our approach so thats a good thing.

[wayno]

suunto is a good brand

[GPSGuided]

I have just bought another Suunto from this lot at their recent mid-year sale (a little deeper discount than now). Until one gets to the magnetic declination adjustable global models, I don't think there's much b/n Suunto's A10 and A30 models apart from the magnifying lens and I'd just pick the cheaper of the two. A warning on online purchase of compasses. Unless it's a global compass, they are either balanced for the northern or southern hemisphere, so most of the ones from the US would not work well here in Australia/NZ. Also, US models have imperial scales and won't match our 25k topo maps. So before you buy, make sure you can confirm that it'll work in the southern hemisphere and have metric scales.

http://www.wildearth.com.au/shop/hiking ... *&^%$#@!/1921