NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2026 Jan 15, 09:15 -0800
I know what you mean: in French, the call sign of CHU sounds just like that. :)
Steve B., you wrote:
"How often would the signal fail to reach a navigator out on the open ocean ---? Could I have gone ten days withut hearing accurate time. or mre like two days?? Also, what did they annunce as the time NAME before it was UTC? Did they say GMT in the 1960s??"
I don't know the answers to any of these myself, and I hope someone with ocean experience from the 1950s/60s will remember. Another option on the naming: they may have announced the time as "Zulu" back then. But, like you, I suspect it was called "GMT". Some will argue that, technically, GMT no longer formally existed in the 1950s, but that leans into nitpicking since the term was still widely used back then, and it's still widely used today, especially in cultures with British navigation roots.
Frank Reed
