Yes, that was the issue with Transit - fixes were infrequent and came at irregular intervals. The ship I was on had an automated DR system, and e could see a continuous (pen on paper) display of our position; whenever a fix came in there would be a big kink in the line!
The Decca chart plotters, pen on paper, getting their position from the Navigator chain and plotting it out as they trawled along fishing, our chain was 6C in the north of Scotland, oh how the skippers of the fishing boats kept those charts close to their chest, Top Secret where they had found good fishing grounds.
The pen on paper display I remember was probably Decca. Unfortunately, I was too busy being very seasick to take all the details in!The Decca chart plotters, pen on paper, getting their position from the Navigator chain and plotting it out as they trawled along fishing, our chain was 6C in the north of Scotland, oh how the skippers of the fishing boats kept those charts close to their chest, Top Secret where they had found good fishing grounds.
On my 17th birthday I was invited on a turbo prop aircraft belonging to the CEO of Tenants Caledonian Breweries, they had an Aviation Decca chart plotter that they used
The Decca chart plotters, pen on paper, getting their position from the Navigator chain and plotting it out as they trawled along fishing, our chain was 6C in the north of Scotland, oh how the skippers of the fishing boats kept those charts close to their chest, Top Secret where they had found good fishing grounds.
On my 17th birthday I was invited on a turbo prop aircraft belonging to the CEO of Tenants Caledonian Breweries, they had an Aviation Decca chart plotter that they used
Ah, Syledis! Sailed with that on a dynamically positioned side stone dropper on the North West Shelf about 43 years ago.
"Not to be used for navigation"...
The perils of maps in the hands of graphic designers, who never seem to understand that a map is a representation of reality, not merely a graphic element in the design.
A surveyor I worked with on land crews had done time on oil rigs. He reckoned that a closure error of a millimetre was a cause for concern on an oil rig. That was, of course, for structural integrity and measurement of any settling, not absolute position fixing.
Me, too, but we used Decca and Transit. That would have been about 1975, before I got into the Polar regions!
I left Decca in 1976 and went to a recording company, Grampian Records, to service their recording studio and associated equipment.
Decca Hi-Fix and Pulse/8 were used for more accurate positioning. My old dad was chief surveyor for Decca Survey and later Racal.
I worked for Olympic Studios and Trident Audio (building/installing their mixing consoles) in the late 70s. Just installed a Gobius tank level detector today, cleaning wipes were Isopropyl Alcohol. A familiar smell from cleaning tape heads and getting Mick Jagger's spit out of a Neumann mic.
Did he leave you a mars bar in appreciation?
