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Bertram31.com General Bulletin Board
Re: Story about that cross track error...
Posted By: Peter In Response To: Re: Story about that cross track error... (Vic Roy)
Date: Thursday, 5 May 2005, at 5:56 p.m.
I learned how to use loran A on a friend's boat.. thank God I never had to use it. I was always worried about that sky wave thing.. it just seemed like an easy thing to goof.
Then on to Loran c and early sat nav. Was about 2 1/2 days out of Bermuda in nasty weather when I noticed the Motorola sat nav was giving very odd position information. It turns out that it had only been running in dead reconing mode for the last 24+ hours rejecting all satellite fixes. Of couse it didn't have any nifty little display that said something like "Hey, Navigator, my last good fix was over a day ago." Nope it just merrily kept spitting out lat lon as if it knew where it was.
I think I was green for 12 hours after reconstructing our position from the deck log, (bad weather so no sun or stars to help), troubleshooting and fixing the sat nav (antenna lead), and resetting the sat nav. Oh what I wouldn't have done then for a hand held gps backup..but at that point GPS was still a pipe dream!
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