Modern gadgets

[DownWest]

First gadget I used was a Transister radio to pick up Consol, in '63. Then a walker log in '69 in the Med. Bit later, in '77 a Seafix RDF. That was good back then. Fitted a Satnav to the company yacht in 83 ? which was slow to find itself and just as I was casting them off for the US, lost it's position. Skipper was expecting to use his sextant, so the Satnav was a bonus.
Current kit for the little boat is a Garmin 72 GPS with a Yeoman and a HH VHF. And.....a Seafarer depthsounder. Gotta keep up with tech.

First culculater was in '74. £24, down from £35 as on offer for staff at Bayer and I was dating a girl who wrote their tech stuff. It actually had a constant! Bit clunky and came with a charger and soft case.

 

[ghostlymoron]

I used a slide rule at university and for a couple of years afterwards until calculators became available. We also used an early electronic distance device, I think called a geodimeter, it was a fairly bulky item and powered by a car battery so not pa4iclarly portable a far cry from modern GPS.

 

[C08]

First was a, you know, spinning depth sounder on my Dad's boat. My first own boat, a somewhat needy Waterwitch, also came with a whirly sounder in a rather large box, but, height of sophistication, with a paper printout. I was never sure what I would use that for as I had no intention to conduct hydrographic studies.

Next came a Decca reader, remember those? Just a couple of years later it was no more than an expensive piece of electronic trash.

I really liked the Decca Navigator -at the time it seemed wonderful.

 

[C08]

I first used a mechanical calculator in the late 50's at my first job at the Shirley Institute laboratories. It was amazing where you slide little sliders around to adjust for number increments in tens and then pulled a handle to actuate the calculator. I think it pulled one way to add and the other way to subtract, not sure if it multiplied and divided? I also there used a thing called the Babbage Integrator for plotting the area under a graph. I used to do field trials in the many Cotton Spinning Mills that operated in the North West then. Some of those old Victorian cotton processing machines with dates on them around 1890 were in constant use and were amazing engineering contraptions, Carding Machines, Slubbing Machines and Spinning Frames 30 or 40 feet long moving in and out and doffers walking in and out with the machine to repaire broken ends. You only had to trip to become overun by the machine and many of these cotton workers were young girls. A H&S nightmare apart from the general health hazards of inhaled fibres. Ah the "good" old days.
I then used a 4ft long slide rule to calculate explosive gas concentrations to umpteen decimal places at the SMRE at Buxton.
I rather wish I had kept my Seafarer Depth Sounder, such a pretty thing as avisual concep!

 

[johnalison]

I really liked the Decca Navigator -at the time it seemed wonderful.

I fitted Decca to a Sadler29 which we bought new in 1987. A friend had had the Navstar a year or two earlier. I think the Decca cost about £420 at the time, but it made cruising much more relaxing. This was even better when I bought a repeater from Cruisermart in Southend, which was discounted from £200 to £50. This was handy in the cockpit and would display four parameters of speed and distance much a modern one. I last used Decca in 1999 on an extended cruise around the Channel Islands, by which time some of the signals were degraded or absent. We encountered fog when approaching Alderney and my newly-purchased Magellan hand-held GPS was a godsend, even with selective availability.

 

[TernVI]

I bought a Navstar 2000 satnav for my parents at the Southampton Boat Show in 1988 - it cost GBP 500 then which everybody thought was very reasonable, compared to what else was on the market.
And it was accurate! To a mile or two at the best.
And it would get fixes often - like every 20 minutes or half hour if it was in a good mood.
We were bowled over by it - thought it was amazing.
Navstar also produced a 2000 Decca as well, and I remember using one of these on a boat racing in Cowes Week, and marvelling at how I could just punch in the waypoint for the next mark, and the Decca would give me a course to steer for it.

Re the satnav, my folks were visiting England then, and they were able to claim the VAT back when they flew back home from Gatwick - which made it seem even more of a good bargain at the time.

Now of course you can buy very accurate GPS units for a fraction of what that Navstar cost (in today's money the satnav would probably be about GBP 1,500?)

Prior to acquiring this impressive navigation instrument, we used to navigate around the Eastern Caribbean with nothing more than a compass with outrageous deviations, and a transistor radio for direction finding (even a simple tranny would develop a good 'null' signal, and was pretty accurate).
Oh, and when sailing back to Barbados from the Grenadines, against the wind, 100 miles beating to windward, the best way of navigating was to keep an eye out for the LIAT aeroplanes - if they were still heading east we knew that Barbados still lay ahead somewhere.
Hence why the Navstar satnav became such an amazing and treasured part of our navigation equipment.

Wasn't the Navstar 2000 actually a Decca set?
The marine company Navstar was nothing to do Nato's GPS, which was known as 'Navstar' when it was in the labs in the late 80s.
Before GPS satnav as we know it, there was 'Transit Satnav', which is kind of before my time, but involved waiting for satellites to pass by, so would only give a fix a few times an hour or something? In between fixes, warships would rely on 'the gyro'.

 

[Graham376]

I really liked the Decca Navigator -at the time it seemed wonderful.

We installed Decca in our glider and it really wasn't much use for flying. Can't remember the make but it wasn't very accurate and the menus were a pain to scroll through.

 

[Bajansailor]

Wasn't the Navstar 2000 actually a Decca set?
The marine company Navstar was nothing to do Nato's GPS, which was known as 'Navstar' when it was in the labs in the late 80s.
Before GPS satnav as we know it, there was 'Transit Satnav', which is kind of before my time, but involved waiting for satellites to pass by, so would only give a fix a few times an hour or something? In between fixes, warships would rely on 'the gyro'.

It was definitely a satnav - I remember that there was also a Navstar 2000 Decca, which cost a bit less (Johnalison mentions buying one in 1987 for about GBP 420).
But Decca was no use to us in the Caribbean, as there were no Decca transmitters (or whatever they were called) here.

With our satnav, yes, we had to wait for satellites to pass by - I think it needed a minimum of two, preferably 3, to get a fix - if it was in a good mood it could be 'relatively' (ha!) fast, like every 20 minutes, but sometimes it was cranky, and might only get a fix every couple of hours.
Still a lot better though than relying on cranky DR and a transistor radio for RDF!

 

[Uricanejack]

I remember a big radio mast being built, in Kentra. Nobody really seamed to know why. speculation at the local shop, it might have something to do with Navigation and all the RAF planes which used to fly by almost daily basis.
I later spotted it was a Decca Slave station, for the west of Scotland chain.

 

[luke collins]

Did any one try one of these.