I have a project where there are GPS points that are centered around the Chesapeake bay, with some points extending between North Carolina and southern Canada
I have been using the NAD83 Virginia South state plane because I was told that a projected coordinate system is more accurate for distance calculations, but I am unsure if this projection would be reliable with the spread of my data points.
I read that outside of a specific state zone errors increase quickly, but I couldn’t find any information on how error accumulates if points extend outside of the bounds of the state zone (for example, for every 5 km outside of the state zone you’d see error increase by 1 m).
Do you know if this information is available anywhere, or am I misunderstanding how the error works? Would a more general projection for all of North America such as the North America Equidistant Conic be a better choice?