help please

[Raoul]

Hi all, i have just bought myself the Garmin etrex and have been looking at google earth at my home town, i spotted my house and the coordinance were.
32.05.25.45 S and 115.49.54.29E But the last number will not fit in the space provided.
32.05.25.4 S 115.49.54,2 E
I tried it out with the last number in both east and north missing and it puts me about half mile away from home.
What am i doing wrong, thanks for any help Raoul

 

[Andrew Kalinowski]

The position shown by Google Earth is in:
degrees minutes seconds.decimal seconds
The default position format in eTrex is in:
degrees minutes.decimal minutes

To use eTrex with Google co-ordinates, change receivers position format to match.
It's somewhere in Menu / Setup / Units / Position Format
Set it to: hddd mm ss.s

 

[Raoul]

Thanks Andrew changed the settings, but still missing the last digit and its now almost a mile from where its supposed to be. Thanks for trying. Cheers Raoul

 

[Andrew Kalinowski]

The last digit is not really significant. If (say) google shows .99 (last two digits) of a second and you would enter .9 instead, the whole difference would be 2 yards or so.
I forgot to mention, make sure that the datum in the receiver is set to WGS84 datum. That's the one used by Google Earth for the images.
Either you are entering the data incorrectly or Google Earth is off by a mile.

 

[Raoul]

Andrew thanking you heaps that wgs84 did the trick, also thanks for explaining about the last digit that had me confused.
I'm sitting in front of the computer with Google earth locked in on my house roof and punched in the coordinates and the gps tells me i'm arriving at my destination and its only 2 metres off, in other words spot on.
Thanks again, realy appreciated. Raoul

 

[Andrew Kalinowski]

Well, let it be a lesson to everybody.

Using correct DATUM is IMPORTANT.

Hmm, I wonder what datum you had the unit set for that you got half a mile diff?
If it was NAD27, I'd expect the diff to be under 200 meters.