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GPS and space debris...

4K views 32 replies 16 participants last post by  Valiente 
#1 ·
Wondering if we may want to dust off our sextants in the coming months and years. A derelict Russian satellite and a functioning American satellite collided a few days ago, creating a debris field 500 miles above the earth. Apparently this is a popular orbit for the satellites that give sailors, airmen and drivers coordinates for our navigational devices. Once you have a collision like this, it's like a chain reaction, causing more collisions and more debris, so on and so forth. And it apparently takes a little time for gravity to clean up the mess (10,000 years, according to some sources). I'm wondering when space is going to be all but inaccessible to us...

Read it and weep:

Space crash debris to orbit Earth for 10,000 years - Yahoo! News
 
#32 ·
Valiente—

Unfortunately, too many GPS chart plotter users believe that the icon of the boat is actually where to boat is in the real world. What the icon of the boat actually represents is an assumed physical location, subject to the accuracy limitations of the satellite system being used, on a map makers interpretation of the real world, which may be based on information that is decades old. There's way too many qualifiers in that for me to rely on it. Mark I eyeball is always my primary navigation tool when in coastal waters... Dead reckoning, CN and GPS are all to be used when in open waters.
 
#33 ·
Well, we are beginning to derail the thread, but that is what I was getting at: how the behaviours of sailors relying solely on GPS are on occasion premised on unsupportable or transitory data.

I prefer to think of GPS are "a really good suggestion with elements of a guess", and I don't use the plotter aspect, preferring to transfer lat/lon to a paper chart, and then to look at the paper chart, and then look out the pilothouse window, and then back at the compass, and then back out the window, and then I figure out if I actually am when I'm supposed to be.

And yet every summer you can see gloriously clean Bendytoys in Lake Ontario with a guy at the helm in a Tilley hat staring at a huge helm plotter display, more or less oblivious to his immediate surroundings.

I really enjoy sailing past such people in my monstrous steel tank about five feet away, and fouling their wind! I grin and wave and say "Nice day, skipper! How's she runnin'?" as I haul ass ahead. One guy actually dropped his drink when the shadow of my sails fell across his display.

Yeah, I'm a bit of a ***** sometimes. But it's actually a worse problem than idiots driving with a sandwich in one hand and a cell phone in the other, because of kayakers, canoeists and so on that these dopes aren't looking for.
 
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