NavList:

The Royal Institute of Navigation has been experimenting with virtual presentations for a few months now.  Therefore, when the little round hairy critters invaded, and the RIN suddenly had to cancel a training seminar at short notice, they were able to slip into webinar mode relatively quickly.  If like me you’d never heard of a webinar until last week, what happens is you’re sent a link to your computer, which you select any time before the declared start time.  You register by giving your name and email address and ticking circle agreeing with GDPR, whereupon you’re invited to enter the room.  Upon entering, you get a countdown until just before the start time when the screen lights up and wonderful things start to happen.  A little picture appears bottom right from which the administrator introduces the speaker.  Then the speaker appears in the box while their PP slides fill the whole screen.  If you want to ask a question, there’s a panel on the far right where you can type it in.  At an appropriate time, the administrator asks your question for you, and the speaker answers.

The RIN is using a commercial system called ‘webinarjam’.  One benefit of most systems is that the lectures are savable.  Their first attempts at webinars have turned out to be so successful that with the speakers’ permission they’ve been put on YouTube.  They did benefit of course from having good speakers used to seminars, professors, and PhDs used to teaching.  An ‘um-err’ speaker might not have performed so well.  You can access them via the RIN website https://rin.org.uk/page/Webinars.

I offer them for three reasons: to show what’s possible when normal seminars and lectures must be cancelled due to CV19; in case readers wish to brush up on the latest on Securing GNSS position and Timing; and to show what goes around often comes around.  Looking at combining discrete probability densities as part of sensor fusion techniques in Mike Jones’ Lecture 4 after around 13 minutes in, isn’t that very similar to what our ‘cocked hat’ enthusiasts have been talking about, and don’t the hyperbolae error bands tie in awfully well with what we were taught years ago to be aware of when using Gee, Consul, and Decca.  DaveP