I read with interest an article about GPS at Panbo.com which started me thinking about how much GPS there is these days, my mobile phone has a GPS with Google maps, you can get a tag for your dog or pet with a GPS locater. Cars have GPS navigators, hill walkers, mountain climbers, arctic explorers, jungle adventurers literally every man and woman and his/her dog has GPS these days. It’s all GPS.
Now I can remember the days when it was new to ships and had just been downgraded in classification from the US military for use in civilian applications for navigation of commercial vessels. The units were bulky and broke down regularly and we used to check the accuracy of the GPS by comparing our celestial observations with the GPS, the celestial observation being the more accurate of the two. Close to land the GPS was turned off and one navigated with the radar and visual bearings….mark one eyeball method being used too. Surprisingly enough we managed to get in and out of port without any problems, and the world kept turning. In the Red Sea, you would get calls from Greek ships on the VHF radio asking “have you GPS?” and “what is your position?” the standard answer being “on the bridge….”
It didn’t take too long before GPS was being used to test the accuracy of celestial observations, although at the turn of the millenium it looked bad for GPS for a while because of the millennium bug but the clock kept ticking and the world kept turning and the GPS kept spitting out positions with lots of decimal places. I don’t think that many officers on ships deep sea know how to use the sextant any more or where it is, or what it is….something from the old days anyway. You have an entire generation of deck officers who know how to plot a position from a GPS, but who don’t really know where they are or where they are going to, or what the next course will be, or what the ETA is….maybe not that bad but sometimes I wonder!
Anyway this article mentions delays in implementing upgrades and even suggests an entire collapse of the system, shock horror, the world would be full of defunct electronic receivers and a lot of people who were suddenly lost, not knowing where they were going to or coming from, or where the dog was or what street they were on, and “map reading” what is that some kind of 20th century thing?
I don’t think we are that close but you can hear the phrases “who would have thought it could happen ?” and “GPS failure creates havoc on road networks, drivers completely lost….”
Time to dust off the sextant methinks……or who knows where we will end up!
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