This evening, I went out hiking and discovered my baseplate compass has finally lost enough fluid from the capsule so the needle can’t rotate around to find north. This compass isn’t even a year old and while I expected it to happen someday, I wasn’t expecting it to happen this soon. The last time this happened to me, I tossed the compass away only to regret it later. This one will continue to serve me as a map protractor. I can still use it to find map bearings and distances on a map. The Cammenga compass I bought more recently is way better for shooting azimuths. The Cammenga sucks on a map though, unless you want to always orient the map to magnetic north. I don’t. It’s easier for me to convert map or true bearings to magnetic and vica-versa. As far as which compass works better in-hand, honestly both work pretty well. They both have trade-offs. The Cammenga is way more accurate and trues up really quickly, but the numbers are very tiny and it can be a pain to read. The baseplate compasses I’ve had are great (for a while) and accurate enough for walking around.
