Intro

A hand-held GPS receiver (from here-on-in referred to as your 'GPS') is a portable device that is used to track the GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) system that orbits the Earth. It scans the open sky for visible satellites and by using at least three satellites, your GPS can calculate exactly where you currently are on the Earth within a few meters of accuracy. Pretty amazing for a tiny unit...and some only cost $100!

GPSs came into the sports of hang gliding and paragliding in the mid-to-late 90s and changed the way we flew. It gave us a portable, low-cost solution to navigate our way across the ground without the use of paper-based maps and allowed us to not even 'really' know the terrain we were flying over but still could relay to our ground-crew exactly where we were.

For flying Cross-Country (XC) this meant it was much easier to travel to other flying sites, get some coordinates in our GPSs and off we went....not as much need to study maps and road names and town names to help navigate us to were flying to - especially in competitions. Trust the arrow on your GPS and away you go!