No LL
Attention all boaters. Start brushing up on your celestial and coastal navigation skills. Why? See below.
US government officials are concerned that the quality of the Global Positioning System (GPS) could begin to deteriorate as early as next year, resulting in regular blackouts and failures – or even dishing out inaccurate directions to millions of people worldwide.
Read the full story here.
Airplanes also increasingly use GPS navigation. They too may have to brush up on older methods. Ditto automobile drivers.
In case you don't know, like many other boats, Tarwathie has a so-called GPS chart plotter. It shows our position on a moving map. In principle it works like modern GPS street map devices in automobiles. In practice it also gives us information on water depths, location of buoys and markers, hazards, channel boundaries, tides, currents, and nearby marine facilities. It is extraordinarily useful and we would find it hard to imagine cruising without it.
I think that Libby and I will have to start cruising more with the GPS turned off just so that we hone our non-GPS navigation skills.
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And maybe contact President Obama about that plan to retire Loran. Guess I'll keep testing and ocassionally using the old Loran receiver on Lady J.
ReplyDeleteAnd keep up at least my piloting skills. I've watched both you and Carmelo try and take sites for celestial navigation. If you guys have such trouble getting the knack for it, I'm hopeless.
Jim R.