NavList:

Dan A, you wrote:

"These kind of posts get me more excited
about navigation than almost any other, because we do not always have
sophisticated nav gear with us, yet he shows us that if we just THINK
a bit more, we can deduce our position in this "back-of-the-envelope"
manner with great satisfaction."

I'm glad you liked it, Dan. You made it worth the trouble of posting. :-)

 

This procedure is, of course, a trivially simple thing, but it's nice to see it work so well in practice. It might make a nice demo for basic navigation students (e.g. Boy Scouts). It's also relevant to historical methods for determining position. Hang a couple of plumb lines side-by-side from a tree branch (as long as it's not too windy) and you can do the same trick. With extremely simple angle-measuring devices (like my index card, which was more-or-less an improvised "kamal"), you can get latitude to +/- 0.2 degrees easily. So why didn't this happen more often historically?? As for longitude, truly portable GMT is a 20th century invention, but when it's known, the same accuracy should apply.