Just curious, what did you expect the freezer to do to it?

Sometimes you might see a small bubble(s) form in the liquid that is used for dampening in cold in compasses, but that is only temporary while it is cold.

It hits you when you least expect it. The time when I got convinced to have a compass always on me was of canoeing in marshes. The first use of the compass was next where I was somewhere in the center of Munich and left with 1.5h for returning rental car to the aiport and checking for the flight. I knew that the airport was somewhere north of the city and if I made to the northern outskirts I would presumably find direction signs there. I made to the flight thanks to the compass. This was before the widespread GPS use. Even, with GPS there had been many cases of phone being wound up, no GPS signal, screen cracked, downpour such that you cannot take the phone out, Google Maps telling wrong direction, telling only geographic direction, people giving you directions that disagreed with what the compass said etc. I am sure that if you mostly stay at home, you don't need a compass to get to the kitchen :)

The fluid first becomes very viscous making it hard for the needle to move and eventually the fluid just seems to solidify. With the common ball type of bike compass the direction got stuck well above the freezing temperature for water, could be 8C/45F or something.

Got it. Quality brands of compasses use a fluid that will not be too viscous in cold weather. I have several Silva compasses, never was a problem. But in the cold a small bubble sometimes formed. I can see where a cheap compass bell might use a fluid for the temperature inside the retail store but nowhere else.

In Utah, I met a lot of people that thought they had a really good sense of direction. Probably not, when they go east into the mountains, they get lost like everyone else does. In the great valley, you have the sun (almost never any clouds), the road numbers are all in reference to the Temple in SLC, and there is a huge mountain range to the east. And in most places, you can see the lake. If you get lost there, it's proof that you have a horrible sense of direction.

I looked at my tree, the leaves are pointed in the direction it gets the most sun, which isn't south. More due east. But it was an interesting experiment.

I think looking at leave's .growing direction must be coupled with knowledge of the local climate.
Also it would be better to look at the leaves on a few trees separate from each other so you get a broad sample.
If you know which way east is then I am pretty sure you can figure out which way is north.

If anyone is interested I know a method to determine which way is north by the crescent moon.

I'm sure the first step in the boy scout method is to find an isolated tree that isn't in the shade of anything. I just don't happen to have such a tree. Interestingly, the neighbor's evergreens are really sparse on the north side. They are isolated on the south

Viking navigation by sun stone , was demonstrated to work on a science program .. Even when overcast..

and they used that before the compass was developed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone_(medieval)

https://www.marineinsight.com/mariti...igation-at-sea





....

When you move between different places, you encounter different conventions, sometimes vastly different, for navigating. When coming from outside to Utah, it would presumably take a while and maybe too late to figure out that everything is with reference to the Temple. An American sitting inside a building asked about the direction to North will likely answer correctly, because of the common use of geographic directions in everyday life. A European will be likely completely baffled by the question, because of the lack of such references in everyday life.

In Germany the direction for a freeway is indicated with the name of some small city where the freeway ends that you never heard of and presumably missed on the map, completely pointless unless you are a German resident. Of course in a foreign country you don't even have sense where major cities are, so the city names are of little use in the first place.

Conventions for marking hiking trails are bafflingly different in different countries and you can perish for real in the wilderness etc. After a hair raising adventure in French Alps, with getting lost after misunderstanding the trail markings, I encountered a grave with a cross and a date of 1936. Upon getting back to safety I chatted with a local about my adventure and laughed how hysteric I was given that the true mishaps are so rare. The response was that the cases of people perishing were so common, 6-7 per season per valley in the surrounding, that the local newspapers practically quit reporting those incidents given their commonplace nature.

Very interesting.
It begs the question.
What came first spiritual worship of the stone or a practical application?

The Norse also supposedly used a long rope trailing behind the ship that was lined up with a reference point or two.
I never read any more about it than that.

I usually noticed that the leaves were pointing downwind.

I got a larger Suunto compass and incorporated it into my travel mount system relying on tripod 1/4-20 thread and velcro. The compass is somewhat sensitive to the proximity to the handlebars with infrastructure there and seemingly most importantly to the headset and not so much to the rest of a steel frame. The deflection away from the true magnetic north seems to depend on the bike.

In any case the compass passed the freezer test and I decided to keep it intact, i.e. it taken be taken off and used for hiking. My system benefits from wide availability of various cheap and decent pieces for photo equipment and allows me to move things around between bike, camera, car etc. Whether the compass will work in practice in the handlebar area remains to be seen. Photos below.

http://i65.tinypic.com/jqhizt.jpg

http://i65.tinypic.com/143lsep.jpg

http://i66.tinypic.com/e9bziu.jpg

Some smartphones have a flux gate compass built in. Does yours? If it does, you can use your phone as a compass. It is important to get it as close to level as you can, at an angle it can have significant error. If however the phone manufacturer used some iron in the phone, it could have some built in error from that too.

I am not sure which LG that is, my LG is a Phoenix 2 and it has a built in compass. I have not tried to use it much so I can't say how accurate it is.

I am not sure which apps work with the compass, but I know that the free app GPS Test will show the compass. You might need to have your GPS turned off for the magnetic compass works, not sure about that.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d....gpstest&hl=en

That however could consume a lot more power than your Suunto compass that operates for free.

Yes, I have a compass built in. The LG Stylus 2 Plus was bought following a matrix of requirements. It is a HK version and it serves me better outside of US than in but then I decided my situation outside is more fragile and I need more help there :D. Indeed I can run an app but then I need the screen for Google maps and the tiny compass there can be easily missed and sometimes you enter a mode where it freezes.

The bottom of the phone seems to have particular impact on the compass, hence my attempt to push the latter forward. Regarding influences on sensors, the smaller the sensor the smaller the impact of nonmagnetized ferromagnetic material on the sensor. This is because the needle or some equivalent thereof sees the image of itself in the ferromagnetic material. Hence a small compass/sensor should be more immune to such influences, as the mirror image is tinier. On the other hand, ferromagnetic materials tend to be at some level magnetized affecting any sensor at the same level. In the end you see a combination of both effects, but smaller sensors, such as in a phone, have a chance to fare better. I'll try to do some tests comparing the phone compass with Suunto around the handlebars, but now have to work on things that were partly neglected when working on the compass mount :lol: