Get your position right...

NormanS said:
The CG insist on lat and long positions. There are at least two reasons for this.
1. Simple lack of local knowledge.
2. Possible confusion due to multiple places having the same name.
Click to expand...

Plus you may be speaking to a control centre that is hundreds of miles away from the incident location so they rely on Lat & Long to locate the casualty on their charting systems. "Three miles south-west of Beachy Head" will mean nothing to an operator in Aberdeen!
 
mjcoon said:
According to my home-made calculator:
100000000000000 ^ (1/3)=46415.8883361278
(where "^ (1/3)" means cube-root)

So five thousand words should be enough, three at a time.

Mike.
Click to expand...

I was assuming a place system associated with some sort of tesselation, so the three words represent a number in a system with a very large base. I don't know their system, so either of us could be right.
 
Giblets said:
Plus you may be speaking to a control centre that is hundreds of miles away from the incident location so they rely on Lat & Long to locate the casualty on their charting systems. "Three miles south-west of Beachy Head" will mean nothing to an operator in Aberdeen!
Click to expand...

I thought I covered that in "1.".
 
AntarcticPilot said:
I was assuming a place system associated with some sort of tesselation, so the three words represent a number in a system with a very large base. I don't know their system, so either of us could be right.
Click to expand...

I still don't understand how you came up with your figure of 29,000,000 words, but I'm sure they don't use that many! And I do not know how they map their triplets of words onto the Earth, just that 5k x 5k x 5k is enough for your count of grid squares...

Mike.
 
mjcoon said:
I still don't understand how you came up with your figure of 29,000,000 words, but I'm sure they don't use that many! And I do not know how they map their triplets of words onto the Earth, just that 5k x 5k x 5k is enough for your count of grid squares...

Mike.
Click to expand...

The truth according to Wikipedia is somewhere inbetween. Wiki says there are 57 trillion (I think they mean 10^12) squares, needing 39,000 words ( that's ~(57x10^12)^(1/3)) to represent all land and sea squares.

Derek
 
WhatThreeWords is biased towards English speakers (I may be wrong about that, but if I am, it means that an English speaker receiving a French whatThreeWords might not recognize and be able to spell all the words, and vice-versa).

I had a play with W3W in France and it gave me English words until I went into the settings and change the language to French, when it became fluently French, with French words for the same position. There's a long list of languages, which is what's needed for local use, but less than ideal for use at sea in the bits between language areas. Since English (or some variant thereof) is already the international language, if I couldn't speak the local language, I'd use the English version, spelling the words.

Actually, I'd use lat/long. Most of the time, I think that using W3W at sea, especially by yotties who are familar with lat/long is a bit like using pliers to undo a bolt. Most of the time, you've got the right spanner to hand anyway, so why not just use it? The likelihood of having W3W and not having lat/long seems pretty remote. OTOH, If I'm hiking somewhere a bit remote and take a tumble, W3W is ideal, especially if I'm not familiar with lat/long.

Incidentally, they use 40,000 words for a 3mX3m grid.
 
biscuit said:
Is "What 3 Words" the way of the future? I'm surprised that there seems to have been little discussion of this innovative system on these forums.
Click to expand...

What three words depends on getting contact with the internet to tell you the words and is not that easy to use. It is intended for fixed installation when you only do it once, remember it, and read it back to the emergency operator. It is also commercial propietory etc. If you mispronounce it, it becomes more useless than lat/long as a single letter wrong could put you 12000 miles away not merely a few minutes of latitude ie miles.

We were considering using it on the Railways for installation but I have challenged this and now we are doing something else for detailed positioning
 
Last edited:
cpedw said:
The truth according to Wikipedia is somewhere inbetween. Wiki says there are 57 trillion (I think they mean 10^12) squares, needing 39,000 words ( that's ~(57x10^12)^(1/3)) to represent all land and sea squares.

Derek
Click to expand...

Stemar said:
WhatThreeWords is biased towards English speakers (I may be wrong about that, but if I am, it means that an English speaker receiving a French whatThreeWords might not recognize and be able to spell all the words, and vice-versa).

I had a play with W3W in France and it gave me English words until I went into the settings and change the language to French, when it became fluently French, with French words for the same position. There's a long list of languages, which is what's needed for local use, but less than ideal for use at sea in the bits between language areas. Since English (or some variant thereof) is already the international language, if I couldn't speak the local language, I'd use the English version, spelling the words.

Actually, I'd use lat/long. Most of the time, I think that using W3W at sea, especially by yotties who are familar with lat/long is a bit like using pliers to undo a bolt. Most of the time, you've got the right spanner to hand anyway, so why not just use it? The likelihood of having W3W and not having lat/long seems pretty remote. OTOH, If I'm hiking somewhere a bit remote and take a tumble, W3W is ideal, especially if I'm not familiar with lat/long.

Incidentally, they use 40,000 words for a 3mX3m grid.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the clarifications. I wonder if the code used builds in some error correction.

I completely agre with the assessment that it is useful in circumstances where lat/long are not in everyday use, and I am sure that some of my friends who volunteer for an organization called MapAction will be interested in its use - I remember being consulted many years ago about the utility of a tesselation based system for them; for a while I took an interest in tesseral addressing schemes and used one in a satellite data processing application.

I looked up the number of words in an average person's vocabulary, and the answer came up at 20,000 words against a total in the OED of around 180,000 words. However, that must go down a lot when you remove homophones (e.g. which and witch, five and fife (the latter especially in the approved VHF pronunciation!)) and impose other rules such as (?) word length, part of speech (the examples I've seen only seem to use nouns and adjectives, but I haven't looked at many) and pronounceability. So 40,0000 words must involve the use of a lot of words that people don't recognize!
 
The main problem with w3w is that you need a machine to encode and decode it.

It's also subject to the vagaries of spelling, so a language with tighter spelling rules like Spanish might work better than English.
 
I have heard several maydays and panpans relayed by coastguard however hearing a grid ref gave me no immediate clue where they were except Northern hemisphere. If I had hear "Of Rame Head" etc I could easily call up coastguard if they were in my area to get lat and long while having pen in my hand. (Old boat had chart plotter by tiller and radio in cabin which was a fairly common arrangement)

Lat long if given wrongly verbally by victim could be useless. Off Rame Head as additional info gives error correction.
 
JBJag27 said:
The main problem with w3w is that you need a machine to encode and decode it.

It's also subject to the vagaries of spelling, so a language with tighter spelling rules like Spanish might work better than English.
Click to expand...

I've just found a severe limitation of W3W - it seems to be impossible to go south of about 80S, and I presume the same North!
 
oldmanofthehills said:
I have heard several maydays and panpans relayed by coastguard however hearing a grid ref gave me no immediate clue where they were except Northern hemisphere. If I had hear "Of Rame Head" etc I could easily call up coastguard if they were in my area to get lat and long while having pen in my hand. (Old boat had chart plotter by tiller and radio in cabin which was a fairly common arrangement)

Lat long if given wrongly verbally by victim could be useless. Off Rame Head as additional info gives error correction.
Click to expand...

Where is Rame Head can you give a latitude and longtitude so.people know what you are talking about?
 
So, to sum up, W3W has plenty of uses, but they probably don't include maydays or arctic exploration and, for your mayday, "My position is 50 deg, 26.4 N, 1 deg 17.8 W, 8 miles S of St Catharine's Head" would be ideal. Hoping of course, that while you're sorting that out in an unfamiliar area, it doesn't become "My position is 50 deg, 20..glub glub glub...
 
capnsensible said:
Where is Rame Head can you give a latitude and longtitude so.people know what you are talking about?
Click to expand...

Rame head is only noted as for instance as instantly recognisable by any Plymouth sailor and last I heard it was just past Penlee Point. One would rarely give position related to a ship of that name in harbour. I should have said Bloggs Harbour or Numpties Ledge so some folks did not strain at the gnat and swallow the camel.

I must stress that best practice would be to give lat and long plus local detail. Perhaps I am professionally used to greater rigour in safety protocol.
 
oldmanofthehills said:
Rame head is only noted as for instance as instantly recognisable by any Plymouth sailor and last I heard it was just past Penlee Point. One would rarely give position related to a ship of that name in harbour.
Click to expand...

Only pulling your leg. But the ship of the same name lived on moorings for so long that it was shown on Admiralty charts.
The Rame Head is gone now but HMS Bristol still appears on the chart so could serve as a landmark.
 
JBJag27 said:
I think I could cope with that.
Click to expand...

Actually, I think the limitation is a symptom of a worse issue - it depends on a poor choice of map projection that doesn't allow representations of the polar regions, and the nominally 3x3 cells become infinitely large in the N-S direction and infinitely small in the E-W direction. So they can't cover the polar regions, which means it isn't a universal system. Note my username!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Top