GPS How did we manage before

cass123

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Posted a question couple of days ago re powering laptop on board.
Thanks to all who responded. Nigel L; took your advise and joined
GPS discussion group on Yahoo.

Couple of weeks ago, bought one of these compact flash receivers for 68 euro and only the size of a fag packet
for use with the laptop. After seeing my position given to three decimal
points after the minute, got to thinking how it used to be ....
in the days when "Board of Trade"was still stamped on your ticket
Anyone reading who was 2nd.mate at the beginning of the 70's will
remember...............

You did the 12-4 and crashed around 0530 after a few beers with the
3rd.engineer. Called 3 hours later and up to bridge clutching bacon
butty. Made cup if tea,finished butty,wound cronometer,grabbed sextant
(assuming the various errors hadn't changed since the last time you checked in spite of being bounced in and out of box) ,went to bridge wing hoping you would be able to see the sun and horizon and preferably both at the same time. Took your 3 sights while trying to
keep your balance on a bridge wing rolling and pitching all over the place. Then surrounded by bits of paper and a well worn dog eared
copy of Norie's Tables using a height of eye correction which bore no resemblance whatsoever to high the bridge wing was when you took the sights. Got your p/l ,ran it up to noon, couple of G and T's , had lunch,then back up for noon sights. Got latitude, ran it to noon,adjusted
morning p/l and bingo , position where the ship was at noon. Secretly,you knew the ship was no where near the position but you hoped that she was at least within a couple of miles of it.

Now,yesterday,35 years further on , I plugged a piece of black plastic
into the PC, pressed a few buttons, had a fag, and meantime a position
accurate to about 5 meters appeared.................

Don't really need a GPS , but for me it's pure , shameless facination
especially when you think how it used to be.
 
G

Guest

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I know EXACTLY how you feel ...... did all that as well .....

Twilight stars, moonlight stars, Long by Chron (UGH !), Marc St.Helaire (pity named after french - but at least he came over to us eventually !!) .....

Then appeared Transit ..... boy what a joy !! unless you were around China Sea .... at least it put Loran where it should be - in the junk bin !!

Then marched in GPS ..... fab is a word not out of place.

Funny thing is that most boaters don't really need such accuracy ... but they are good ... I spend more time playing with my GPS than actually using it seriously ... it migrates from Car ... road-mapping ... back to boat, on house windowsill - trying out new bits and bobs .... etc.

Used to talk to the wife, now talk to the GPS !!!!
 

Vascojc

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Then I remember the early eighties when the delights of Sat Nav appeared - Excellent intercepts when using the Sat Nav for the DR position!
You might even get a position given to you every 6 hours or so by the box that was bigger than my monitor is now!
 

Evadne

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Aaah Transit!

I remember one of my first survey trips bobbing around somewhere near the Canaries waiting for a fix, satellite goes over, bad fix. You had to wait another couple of hours or just go for the deployment or core or whatever it was, and hope the mates had got a decent fix that day. Now you get chief scientists complaining that the ship's position is no longer on site and can the bridge move her 4.51 metres to the north. And they can!

I still think the worst invention is the Sat. phone. In the old days you had a plan, you set sail and unless you could stir the RO into getting hold of Goonhilly or whoever for a telex, nobody back at base knew how you were doing until you tied up in port again. One of our ships now has 24 hour web access, worldwide. All the trivia of the office brought to your cabin. Still, at least I can go sailing and get away from all that technology!
 

AndrewB

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[ QUOTE ]
Anyone reading who was 2nd.mate at the beginning of the 70's will remember...............

[/ QUOTE ].... and back in those days the high seas weren't full of prats in tupperware yots only out that far cos they have this magic black box that tells them where they are.

So instead of spending time reducing your sunsight, instead you are playing dodgems with some rally or other that's just crossed right in front of you because the box has told them to.

GPS? Every silver lining has a cloud.
 
G

Guest

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Transit .... S.China sea - used to get the sats bunching up .... have 3 or 4 fix's one after another then wait for hours for next lot .... over a period they would space out and then bunch up again .... not funny when you have 85,000 cu.mtrs of LNG to carry up through Palawan passage !!!

As to survey ships ... later when I did that lark - Seismic search for oil etc. We had Syledis system .... best most accurate there was .... BUT in North Sea / US Gulf ... we used to place transponder on rig derricks !! Used to drive us nuts when they 'skidded' derrick .... !! (to the uninitiated .... the derrick actually can move across a template on the rig bed ....)

When shooting near Sicily .... company had to pay local mafia boss protection for the transponder placed on house roof !!!
/forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif
Aye - those were the days !!
 

Peppermint

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Re: Pass me the Seafarer RDF

I'll get a null if it kills me.

The trick was not to worry about hitting your destination but to know which side you'd missed it on, that it was safe there and that your stream was with you. Then you at least knew which way to turn to get in.

An old boy I sailed with had a scale of accuracy. Early in a short passage he might indicate our position on the chart with the pencil point. A bit longer since a fix and he might use his finger. A longtime without a fix and a bit of a blow it could get up to his whole hand.

I crossed the channel a couple of years ago with a rather charmless skipper who allowed no XTE at all. He kept us in the middle of the "roadway" and whatever the GPS said was OK with him. He even motorsailed, in a decent breeze, to stay on track. I thought that was rather over doing it.
 

Piers

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...and I remember when I was flying the 707 for BOAC. Radio beacon nav until out of range, typically over oceans and deserts. And then it was either a bit of guess- and hope-work for short distance, or out with the sextant.

Navigator would use the sextant, and standing awkwardly with one foot on the nav table and the other on the engineer's table, ease the sextant through an opening in the roof of the cockpit. Had to hang onto the star / sun / moon / shot for one minute. Take three shots and plot. Fun when correcting for 8 miles a minute. And just you try to keep your cool when a hostess would come into the cockpit, see you doing the shot legs akimbo, and do unmentionables to distract you....

And then there was Loran, skip distance, e and f layers, loran charts. Hey ho, and it's all GPS, Inertial, Flight Management - where's the fun and stress gone?

Thank you for flying BOAC - we took good care of you!
 

ianwright

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Re: GPS How did we manage before

Doing small boat coastal and oil field stuff in 1971 Walker log DR and EP to find the right platform. Navigating by oil flares and smoke from flare off stacks.
Then we got a charter from a company surveying for a new tanker channel off Doha. They set up a private DECCA system and we spents weeks doing ten mile sweeps,,,, 50 feet apart. The gear on board filled one client cabin..
IanW
 
G

Guest

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Very good job my father not around ...

I think he would be very interested in the Piers post ... having been senior DoT / CAA Flight Ops inspector ... In fact he was a senior involved in Concorde route planning etc. when it was getting close to going commercial ....

I remember him talking about Double Doppler, INS ..... etc. I actually have a cine of him using a bubble sextant in a B-17 Flying Fortress - he was a navigator on Wellingtons during war and then later he helped deliver the B-17 for Steve McQueen movie where SM crashes into Cliffs of Dover at the end ... the B-17 came from Canada to UK for filming - then back again and he did both flights ....
 

TrueBlue

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Re: Very good job my father not around ...

Ah, what a lot of nostalgia...

Got wun of them thingies in me Motor, wonderful 'till a very nice lady's voice says:-

"If you can do a U-Turn", problem is she keeps on saying it for a while, then sulks.

I just don't know why....

Bit like SWMBO, but she says "turn there" and points finger..
 

cass123

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Glad to have provoked the discussion, thanks for the memories guys.

I guess we could all write books about the times where we thought
the ship was but wasn't, where she was but we didn't know or where
she should have been but we wern't sure.

Were they the good old days or the bad old days????????????????
Not sure but at least now we have GPS to keep us on the straight
and narrow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.
 

tugboat

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Yeah, did that - proper nav and very satisfying. Crossing the pond and making a good landfall was great. Also remember satnav. Doing a hotshot to the beach in Brazil on a clapped out rigboat, black as a boot, no radar, zero vis in rain like stairrods, echo sounder climbing like a rat up a drainpipe and pleading with the satnav to give a fix. I'd stopped smoking a week previous and started again that night! Aahhh- memories! /forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif
 

philip_stevens

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The BOAC hoarding in the middle of the Suez Canal, in the days before the wars and the canal being widened, stood for "Better On A Camel". /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif

I sailed on a Tall Ships Race (1966 I think), in Merlin (Fleet Air Arm windfall yacht with a lot of history - and a photo of Hitler inspecting the yacht and crew in 1936 or 38), from Falmouth to Copenhagen via the finish off the Skaw lightvessel, many years ago, in the days (dying days) of Consul navigation system.

In a previous sail bringing Merlin back from Rotterdam to Dover, I had to take a "fix" with the Consul - counting the bleeps. While just behind a lightvessel (forgotten which) I plotted our position in the middle of Kent. Wrong, I think!! /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif

No, I didn't sail during the trials of Longitude!! /forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif
 

Talbot

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Wot nobody recalling the joys of the RDF, or even the original decca system with those three spinning dials and the charts with three channels on them - did anybody ever bother with the book with the fixed decca errors?
 

cass123

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RDF and the old Decca system, Talbot, now your talking.

With the master dial that had that pointer segment whizzing around and was supposed to tell you if the slaves were reading the proper lane.
Making a landfall at night in the western approaches where the lines of intersection were so narrow they looked like stretched out fishing lines.
The plastic interpolator which took about as long to find the correct scale as it took to mark the plot.
Fixed error book, think I once saw one in the bridge toilet.

Anyone remember the old Decca mark 4 radars, where you needed
the fingers of a brain surgeon even to turn them on, and if you were lucky , might even pick up some clutter in a force 10.
 
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