The Suunto MC2 is my preferred compass for land navigation. Overall it’s a good compass though and it’s tritium makes it a great choice for night time land nav. The closer your sight is to your eye the less accurate your sight picture. Think of it like the same error when trying to shoot a rifle with a short sight radius. The sighting system also introduces errors when shooting an azimuth. Since one degree is equal to 90 feet at a mile, this is something to keep in mind. I’ve personally compared multiple 3H’s and they’ve been off by a few degrees each. Two cons for this compass are that its is less accurate and also harder to sight. This is the other reason I like keeping it in my chest rig, since if I’m doing nighttime land nav I’m probably going to be wearing my chest rig too. There are different versions but I prefer the one with Tritium for night time navigation. This compass isn’t my first choice for land navigation, for reasons I’ll detail below, but it’s a very solid piece of gear that will get the job done. For this reason this compass rides in my chest rig (dummy corded of course). It’s all aluminum housing has proven to be grunt proof over the years. I’ve had a good amount of experience with three different compasses the USGI Cammenga 3H, the Suunto MC2, and the Suunto Clipper watch compass.Īll three of these have some pros/cons that I feel make them best used in certain situations. I’ve always tried to protect it in a semi hard case and I always take the batteries out when I store it. It’s pretty bare bones by today’s standards but it still works good enough to give me a 10 digit grid when I need one. I’ve got a fairly old Garmin E-Trex that I’ve had for a dozen years or so. It works really good to double check myself to see how accurate my land nav skill is. For these reasons I treat my GPS as a training aid to help me get better with traditional map and compass. GPS, like so many modern conveniences is great until it runs out of electricity or the system that it relies on doesn’t work anymore. For those interested in learning to use this stuff check out my fieldcraft classes. Just like other skills, this one has different pieces of equipment that are better suited to some uses than others. I wanted to share my go-to navigation equipment for navigation in the bush.