I would STRONGLY advocate for decimal degrees. That does not mean degrees plus decimal minutes by the way. I'm engaged in building a database for our worldwide deployments of acoustic listening devices and believe me, the 17 different ways people write down locations are a nightmare to encode logically as well as prone to all kinds of errors. Decimal Degrees is what Google Maps uses and what works best in a sortable list. Decimal degrees also means no use (or misuse) of Northing-Easting style references such as 82°0'0"W instead of -82.0000. Should there be spaces between each part? Are those straight foot and inch marks or curly typography quotes? Does the W come first or last? Ugh! In any given list, you'll find all permutations. Besides, how many people know how to type the degree symbol? On a Mac, it's Shift-Option-asterisk, by the way. (:-)
Here is one of many online calculators to convert from DMS or DM.m: http://www.satsig.net/degrees-minutes-seconds-calculator.htm In my experience, most GPS devices can report out in more than one mode. Just explore the preferences or settings menu. ______________________ Chris Pelkie Research Analyst Bioacoustics Research Program Cornell Lab of Ornithology 159 Sapsucker Woods Road Ithaca, NY 14850 -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
