Recommendations for a Pocket Calculator

Neville220

Neville220

Well-Known Member
Joined
19 Aug 2006
Messages
75
Location
East Bergholt. Ipswich, Suffolk
Visit site
Hi, I am asking for suggestions for a suitable pocket calculator for navigation calculations, specifically Astro Navigation.

Any sensible suggestions greatly appreciated, as I am starting an Ocean Yacht Master (Theory) course and wish to reduce the time and effort taking sights.

I know that most scientific calculators will do the job, but if I am going to buy one I might as well have the best I can afford.

I know there are very experienced yachtsman out there and I hope they will offer their advice.

Regards

Neville
 
if I am going to buy one I might as well have the best I can afford.
Click to expand...
Why

Buy one of the cheap popular Scientific ones that the schools recommend.

Casio used to be what the kids mostly had and probably still do.

Buy two in fact so that if one gets bathed in seawater its no tragic loss and you still have the other.

A programmable one might be useful ... that's what my son had for his A levels ... personally never figured out how to use it!
 
Last edited:
How much can you afford?

http://www.celestaire.com/Computer/Software/View-all-products.html

You can get a TI-89 for less than £100 in immaculate condition. You could get a cheap calculator for much less of course but you have to program it (not that difficult I would have thought) and you have much more chance of losing or deleting the program accidentally.

If you want to pay silly money the Tamaya has built in sight tables as well and probably makes the tea whilst taking shots for you.
 
Try to get one which doesn't need the trig function put in before the number as most modern ones do now. With astro you'll be using the trig functions a lot and you normally want to find the cos or sin or inv cos or sin of whatever number you have in the screen, with modern calculators you need to put this into short term memory, press cos or whatever then bring it out again, with the old ones you just pressed cos, it wouldn't really be an issue but it multyplies your key strokes by 3 and therefore one of the favourite areas for making errors. I spent a hundred quid on a scientific reverse polar notation HP calculator but found that a 3 quid calculator from lidl was just as good. Make sure that it can take degrees and minutes with a decimal of a minute, easily the HP was hopeless on that front for some reason and you had to input degrees and then say you wanted 12.6 minutes it read it as 12 minutes and 6 seconds so you had to put it in as degrees and 126 / 600 which was the same but irritating. (on the other hand I did like the way it worked and especially the way that nobody else could use it).
My favorurite calculators are the old casio ones that I grew up with, they seemed to just work once you'd got used to them. I always do my astro on a calculator, I find it easier than reduction tables which I've never got used to, if I don't have a calculator I could probably work it out but would probably revert to Nories or Burtons tables which is what we used to use deep sea. I still use abc table for the bearing of the object alhough I did once write a programme on a casio handheld computer which worked well but it got nicked and I've not bothered to try to replace it, I only really use astro now for practice or teaching others.
A kind forumite sent me his old Casio after my previous rant on this subject but I got not other sympathy so I might be just being a grumpy old git.
 
Good advice, thanks. Can you recall or ask your son which calculator he had or has?
Click to expand...
That was 16 years ago. He wont remember and the models change anyway.
 
I wouldn't go for an expensive one to start with, maybe later once you know what you are doing but try to get the basics sorted first, same with a sextant you can learn happily on a cheapo plastic one and spoil yourself later if you feel like.
 
pugwash60 said:
I wouldn't go for an expensive one to start with, maybe later once you know what you are doing but try to get the basics sorted first, same with a sextant you can learn happily on a cheapo plastic one and spoil yourself later if you feel like.
Click to expand...

Excellent advice Pugwash, however I have done this before which is why I want a calculator to take the strain out of it, what I want now is the formal qualification and maybe to learn some more, I already have my Sextant, it was a gift from a Trinity House Pilot when he retired. It was he who first taught me but that was some years ago, I've forgotten some and hoping it will all come flooding back.

Nev
 
There was an article in one of the yachting mags, either pbo or sailing today, and it mentioned the calculations for astronavigation and use of a certain calculator, maybe someone will know which magazine edition it was.(a couple of years ago).
 
I loan my astro classes a Casio fx-85ES. It is solar powered and does the business at a cost of under a tenner. You can enter Latitude, Dec and LHA straight into a store, crunch out Hc which goes into Store D all ready to calculate the Azimuth. You just have to watch for the conversion of degrees, mins and secs into degrees and fractions of a degree but again that is only a single button to push.
 
Would it not be good to use a Hewlett Packard one that uses RPN (reverse polish notation). RPN is a fantastically useful feature on a calculator - enabling you to hold loads of separate bits of info in 'registers'. And RPN results in way faster results with fewer button presses also.

Not cheap though!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Top