NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Calculators
From: Bill Murdoch
Date: 1999 Sep 01, 9:54 PM
From: Bill Murdoch
Date: 1999 Sep 01, 9:54 PM
I have had a good time playing with the Texas Instrument calculators. They are inexpensive, easy to program, and readily available. I have TI-67 Galaxy that I bought new for UKL 17. The February 1994 copy of Practical Boat Owner has an article which contains a sun sight reduction program for that calculator. I also have a TI-81 and wrote a similar program for it. That program was published in the March 1996 issue of Cruising World. I have modified the sun sight program for the TI-82 and TI-83. If you wish can send you a copy. The program contains a 0.1', 200 year solar almanac. Given the time and date, the sight data, and the DR, it returns the azimuth and intercept. I also wrote a much longer nav program for a TI-82 which has almanacs for the sun, moon, four planets and 92 stars. It has all be bells and whistles - unknown bodies, mercator and spherical sailings, sun rise and sun set, etc. I sold copies for a few years of the typed program and of the program on diskette (the diskette can be loaded on the calculator through a PC). I learned a lot writing the programs. I had a good time doing it. The TI calculators use a language much like Basic and can be programed either through their keypads or through a PC connected to the calculator with a TI-Graphlink cable. The math is tough, but people did it in the 1800s with little more than logarithm tables. Bill Murdoch