secant clinometer

[Olly Betts]

On Wed, May 02, 2007 at 06:49:23PM -0300, Carlos Gu?no Grohmann wrote:
> OK, so I might misunderstood the Suunto site, and our new clino is a
> different one. The one we have now has a percent scale and a scale
> ranging from 1-160.

Well, secant(0) is 1, and 160 is the secant of just over 89.6 degrees,
so that's plausible if 1 is horizontal and 160 is close to vertical.

But the point I was making is that this scale is very non-linear since 2
is the secant of 60 degrees, so almost all the readings you'll actually
encounter in a cave survey will be in the range 1-2.  Yet readings over
60 degrees get the range 2-160!  You can of course note down more
decimal places, but 1 degree is 1.00015 so you need to note a lot of
them.

I assume the scale is available because there's an application where
you want to calculate something involving secant(inclination), and so
if you can read that directly off the instrument, you can calculate the
value by hand much more easily.

Cheers,
    Olly