NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: GPS jamming concerns
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2016 Aug 9, 21:57 +0000
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2016 Aug 9, 21:57 +0000
Gary, with respect, your logic is akin to blaming a traffic light for a collision ("if it hadn't been there the car wouldn't have stopped")
The race boat going aground on a well known reef was NOT because of GPS -- it was very accurately showing the boat's position -- but depending on a poorly designed chartplotter that didn't show the reef unless one was zoomed in on the display. Their sin was total reliance on a chartplotter without understanding its limitations (and, I'm sure, no warning from the manufacturer) and/or reviewing the sailing on an old-fashioned paper chart. If positioning information were provided by celnav, would the results have been different?
Similarly, the US Navy boats were NOT warned of the presence of the Iranian island. It's hard to blame GPS for that -- or to see how celnav would have made things different.
From: Gary LaPook <NoReply_LaPook@fer3.com>
To: luabel@ymail.com
Sent: Tuesday, August 9, 2016 11:08 AM
Subject: [NavList] Re: GPS jamming concerns
And we just had two illustrations of your point, the race boat going aground on a well know reef and the U.S. sailors getting too close to an Iranian island, both caused on reliance only on GPS and complacency.gl---------------------------------------------------"Simply put, super easy single source position input lulls us and renders us easily distracted to the point where we stop actively looking for danger. From my conversations with a fair number of shipwrecked sailors, this seems to be the ultimate cause of many vessel groundings and accidents (and don’t get me started on “asses with autopilots”). It isn’t the GPS that’s the problem, its human frailty."
