Aiming off is aiming at a line feature deliberately to one side of the target.

Reaching the target directly could be difficult in poor visibility, and if it is missed, the team would not know which direction to go in order to find it.

Therefore, when the line feature is reached, the team will know which direction to go along the line feature (i.e. handrail the line feature) to reach the target.

If the objective is a small or difficult to find feature, aim for another, more obvious feature.

When you find this ‘attack point’ it should now be less of a distance to your main objective, and therefore easier for you to find you initial desired point.

A bearing is the direction from your location to any distant point given in degrees from north.

If you point your compass at a distant point and the compass reads 56 degrees, then the bearing to this point is 56 degrees.

The short distances that we travel means we do not need to worry about the variation between true and magnetic north.

A GPS unit commonly gives a ten-digit grid reference, based on two groups of five numbers for the easting and northing values.

Each successive increase in precision (from six-digit to eight-digit to ten-digit) pinpoints the location more precisely by a factor of ten.

This means that an eight-figure grid reference, such as ‘1926 4548’, indicates a 10m by 10m square on the map and a ten-figure grid reference, such as ‘19267 45487’, indicates a 1m by 1m square on the map.

In the world of Search and Rescue, we generally use eight-digit and ten-digit figure grid references as we need this accuracy to locate smaller areas with precision.

Also, grid references are prefixed by two letters.

These are streams, rivers, ditch lines, paths, forest edges, field boundaries or anything similar that hasn’t been moved.

Following handrails may be longer than the direct route, but you have a definite line that you can follow to get to your target.

You can also go from one handrail to another to get you to your target.

what3words is a geocode system that is designed to identify and differentiate any location with a resolution of about 3 metres.

what3words differs from most other location encoding systems due its use of three words rather than strings of numbers or letters to represent locations.

It is believed that this significantly reduces the rate of transcription errors.

For the best transcription we suggest that you send a w3w picture via Hangouts to minimise errors.