Degrees vs Mils

That was well presented and explained perfectly. As ex military all of my equipment is in mils and I can confirm that getting geographically embarrassed is equally possible whether using mils or degrees 😎. After all, a compass is an aid to navigation, not the solution The main advantage of the mils system for the majority of soldiers is range estimation. The field binoculars have mils graticule etch in (at least they did in my day, I guess they all use GPS these days) and with the knowledge of subtension, 1 mil equals 1 meter at 1,000 meters, it helps to estimate the range to a target when the targets dimensions are known. I think the other disadvantage with buying a mils compass is that mils protractors are much harder to come by is you need to use one on the map.

Very good explanation and good advice. Mils are used to lay targets at very long ranges for artillery, etc, and so they use them in general because all solders should be able to order artillery. Theres no need for a civilain on a hike to use that system.

I served in the British army for seventeen years and was taught to use mils and kilomètres for both navigation and fire control so today, at 65 years old, I still use mils. The only difficulties I ever had was when I did a naval gunfire support course and had to use degrees…..

I have always used the Silva mk4 which has both deg and mils, ive always preferred mils as being a miliary guy, i understand about navigation and bearings etc map reading skills are not just defined by a bearing, there is so much more, being able to look at a map printed in 2D and reading as 3D is a skill, spurs, re-entrants, saddled, relief and vertical interval, GMA, setting a map by landmarks and not having a compass, plotting position by resection. Glad i found this channel. Oh and dont forget all your conventional signs and marginal information. So on our 1:50000 maps are we all measuring in km? We never use to teach soldiers to use imperal measurements. God i went off on one then, just brought so much back to me.

Absolutely right - doesn't matter which system is used, as long as everyone uses the same one. In the USA, the accepted standard is degrees for hikers, backpackers, campers and small boat operators. All LEO and SAR units assisting lost hikers, etc will give bearings in degrees, not mils. US Forest Service, Geological Survey, other federal agencies all use degrees. Even the US Army and Marines use the degree scale for land navigation purposes (mils is only used for artillery MOS). The extra subdivisions of the mil scale won't help you given the built-in error when using a handheld compass. Also, adding the mil scale to a compass dial already marked in degrees just makes the degree scale more difficult to read.

I was a bit confused by the idea of using Mils. Decades ago I did some very basic surveying & worked on some large building sites. Everything we did was built around the building's layout grid, we never talked about the compass, we were more interested in our local TBM & how each block related to that. When I'm out walking thinking in 360 degrees feels natural to me, I would prefer to use that.

Once again a brilliantly clear and concise explanation.

I really appreciate the effort you put in to your videos, they are very interesting and i really am enjoying them . Thank you for talking the time to make them, Best wishes

A full concise explanation of the matter..thank you sir..

interesting. though recently whilst walking in roman footsteps around Britain I wondered how the romans did their navigation. they used a "Groma" ; which is really like an extremely primitive theodolite - made out of a stick ; pivoting cross at top with plumb lines on it - minus any magnetic element. Simply taking sight bearings and dropping stone markers around they mapped and conquered the uk and Europe. A 2000 year old GPX file; so simple and elegant it makes me think when I look at my expensive silva compass with an annoying bubble in it whether they were onto something.......

My understanding of why we use 360 degrees in a circle is because that number is the opposite of a prime number. 360 is evenly divisible by 24 different numbers which makes it useful for quickly and easily doing math with it using only integers. Here are the numbers 360 is divisible by: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180, 360

I've been using the compass since age 10. And I've always used "Degrees". Truth be told, every Civilian I've ever met also used degrees too ! I have yet to meet the hiker in the woods using any other system.

Declination on maps is given in degrees. If the "mil"-compass does not have an auxiliary scale in degrees, compensation will be fiddling with a calculator :-).

I would guess it’s 360 because it has a lot of factors, making for easy mental arithmetic, much like how we used to work in base -12 and had lots of lovely fractions to work with. Sure, there’s other numbers but 360 is more useful than 60 or 2520 when it comes to specifying a direction.

Really interesting. Thanks!

Years ago I worked with a USAF missile tracking radar, the FPS-16. For bearings it used mils rather than degrees.

Excellent, thank you! New Sub!

The real reason the military uses 6,400 angle units for a full circle is for ease of mental calculation. At a distance of 1,000 meters, one angle unit is equal to 0.98 meters (1 meter) on the circumference. All adjustments for the artillery can be quickly calculated with your head. During my training as a land surveyor, I stumbled across the angular unit Mil for theodolites and asked myself what the real background to this unit was?

The unit doesn’t matter it’s just an interval to take from map to ground. The ‘accuracy’ of mils is lost on a compass dial 2” across. On an artillery piece with a massive circle and some lenses to help, the 6400 odd intervals are relevant.

In Sweden we used sivas with mils in the army and used the old RT system " Kingdom net " and later we used UTM system to compare to Nato standard