NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Brad Morris
Date: 2013 Dec 8, 18:15 -0500
Hi Frank
Broadcast RF is indeed going away. Our broadcasts becoming quiet, a mere 100 years after birth in 1910.
In my view, this is the reason why SETI will fail. Out of 13+ billion years of the universe's existence, our signal lasts for 100 years. That's a ridiculously small fraction of the total. No reason to expect ET would differ in period. No contemporary signals means no signals found.
RDF for emergency navigation?
An EPIRB, with satellite uplink of GPS position and the emergency local RF beacon for directionality is the only true emergency navigation anyone should be doing. Seems like an expensive paperweight until you need it. Then it saves your life and appears like an extremely prudent, rational investment.
Brad
I found a message from one of the earlier incarnations of NavList dating back to December 1995 (on lunars) which I've posted in January 1996 in the main message boards. Here are the messages from that year:
http://www.fer3.com/arc/sort2.aspx?y=1996&sort=du.
That old message plus my recent ten-year anniversary on here have got me thinking about the long-term changes in the status of traditional navigation including some that are maybe a little surprising.We've often discussed radio direction-finding as a method of emergency navigation. But radio is disappearing as fast as the Internet advances. Broadcast radio is rapidly disappearing in the frequency bands most useful for direction-finding. There are fewer and fewer high-power, long-range AM stations around the world, except in major cities and along the highways that lead to them. Suppose, for example, that you were making that trip I suggested for "spoofing celestial" back in August. You're sailing from Hawaii to Tahiti. How many AM stations could you actually pick up approaching the Marquesas and then Tahiti if you decided to try this sort of emergency navigation? Is it feasible anymore away from large cities? Are the oceans going radio-quiet?
-FER
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