NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Status of Celestial Nav in 2015
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2015 Mar 10, 21:05 +0000
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2015 Mar 10, 21:05 +0000
Well put, Frank!
I personally wonder about the "NATO GPS jamming" -- did it really happen or was it some other phenomenon that the press, with its usual deep technical knowledge, grabbed as "jamming?" I can't see any naval power (especially a Western one) jamming a resource so critical to safe ship navigation, offshore oil drilling, aircraft navigation, etc -- especially with not giving any notice of intent as is claimed.
Hey, maybe ANZUS GPS jamming explains the loss of Malasia Airlines flight 370!
And remember to pull down tight your tinfoil hat before taking your celestial shots!
Lu
From: Frank Reed <NoReply_FrankReed@fer3.com>
To: luabel@ymail.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2015 11:51 AM
Subject: [NavList] Re: Status of Celestial Nav in 2015
Bob Goethe, you wrote:
"At need, naval ships typically, I believe, jam GPS in a 50 mile radius around them. Depending on how they are distributed, a dozen ships could render GPS unusable across 6,000 square miles of ocean. Evidently, this is pretty much an annual exercise for NATO. I imagine these sorts of things pop up in the Pacific as part of the ANZUS alliance exercises."Let's see, we've got an "I believe" and a "depending... could" and an "evidently" and an "I imagine". Call me skeptical! Do you have a reference for an entire sea being rendered GPS-dark by a NATO exercise? For all of the past twenty years since GPS became fully operational, traditional navigators have been trying to invent disaster scenarios in which, at long last, the skills of the celestial navigator will be not merely useful, but praised and valued. Celestial navigation rides to the rescue! And those scenarios exist in fantasies in large numbers. But how do they compare with the real world?Frank Reed
