Yesterday I was reminded that relaying coordinates via radio, phone, text message, etc., is much easier when all parties are using the same format. This is especially important during emergencies, but it's also useful for general retrieval.

I've been using decimal degrees for coordinates, and I'd like to recommend that others do so as well. Rationale follows:
1. Easy to communicate accurately using voice or text.
2. Easy to enter into navigation programs with little opportunity for ambiguity (How do I enter the degree sign? Should I put spaces, commas, periods, or something else between degrees, minutes, and seconds?).

The only downside to this format is that it's slightly less accurate than one of the others. However it is plenty accurate for our purposes.

Along with configuring your GPS to use decimal degrees, please also take time to configure it so that you can easily and quickly see your current coordinates while in flight. On a Garmin 76, you can define a field on one of the pages. On a Flytec 6030, you can define a field on a page or poke a button when you need to see your position (but you need to know which button to poke).

It's important to be prepared to quickly find your location while you're flying and have the ability to relay that information via radio in an emergency. Suppose you see a fellow pilot toss his reserve, or you see a wing spread out on the ground and the pilot not moving. In situations like these, you will need to relay your coordinates along with an estimate of the distance and bearing to the emergency via radio to people on the ground who can get a rescue operation in motion.

This brings up another bit of often overlooked safety equipment: a radio you can actually use while flying. If you're flying cross-country, you really should have a headset in your helmet and a push-to-talk button you can use for making transmissions while coring a thermal or wrangling a wing in rodeo air. Quiz time. In what type of air are you most likely flying when you need to report the location of an emergency? Bonus question. In what type of air are you most likely flying when you need to tell your retrieve crew where you are and where you're going? Flying with one hand while using the other to grab the PTT on your radio is not that much fun in these conditions. It's also not particularly safe.

When you're on the ground, trying to connect with your retrieve driver or trying to locate a pilot, it's helpful to have several tools at your disposal. Sometimes, the GPS you fly with is the least convenient of them all for this purpose. (Bonus prize to the first one to tell us how to enter a set of coordinates into a Garmin 76 so that you can navigate to that location.) Most of us are carrying GPS-endowed phones. I use Google Maps and GPS Status and Toolbox (https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... gpsstatus2). The latter provides a compass and calculates distance and bearing to a target location.

It's XC season, so please think just a bit about the tools and skills you need to find your way back to civilization after those epic flights.