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Multitasking Gpsr's?


eranou

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If I am working onboard one of our cable ships, route clearance, pre-lay grapnel run or post lay inspection and burial ships I put my GPS in the cabin window. My laptop, with charting software, shows where we are. This saves me going to the bridge to check when we are arriving on site or off a port as I just set up a range ring and an alarm goes off when we cross it. Not accurate enough for operations, we use DGPS for that.

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Not an unusual use for it, but on a recent business trip to Tripoli (Libya) I walked from my hotel into the centre of the town. Decided to get a taxi back as it was too warm to walk. Despite having a card from the hotel with a map and directions in arabic I must have got the only Libyan taxi driver who didn't know his way round his own city. Fortunately I had put the coordinates of the hotel in and I was able to guide him back! And of course on the flight back to the UK I did have it running on the plane (with permission) and was able to prove that the cockpit instruments which displayed on the cabin 'moving map' were in fact accurate (phew.. that was a relief!).

 

Oh, and recently at Greenwich Observatory as I stood on the 'line' I was disappointed to find my GPS was about 5 feet off - didn't display 0 degrees E/W! Perhaps that brass strip set in the paving stones is not actually in the right place after all!

Chris

Edited by The Blorenges
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Oh, and recently at Greenwich Observatory as I stood on the 'line' I was disappointed to find my GPS was about 5 feet off - didn't display 0 degrees E/W! Perhaps that brass strip set in the paving stones is not actually in the right place after all!

Chris

Only 5 feet?? Our GPS, and I thought this was the norm, showed the actual meridian to be about 100 metres away from the brass line and the 'ticket area'. Something to do with earth curvature and various map datums. We use the WGS84 datum which is an average, whereas the British Grid is obviously more acurate in Britain. Something like that anyway!!

 

Anyone else found this as well? or explain it any better!!

 

Dave

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One of my friends had a tourist motorboat out on Windermere with the kids recently + couldn't find the jetty when trying to drop it back off - but had had MM running so was able to check the origin of his track + aim that way...

We played with attaching the GPSr to our eldest with an alarm radius so that when he wandered more than 10m away form a beach base/picnic a sound file went off with me saying "Back to Mummy and Daddy please" in a stern voice. He thought it was great and kept running off to make it trigger :ph34r:

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Oh, and recently at Greenwich Observatory as I stood on the 'line' I was disappointed to find my GPS was about 5 feet off - didn't display 0 degrees E/W! Perhaps that brass strip set in the paving stones is not actually in the right place after all!

Chris

Only 5 feet?? Our GPS, and I thought this was the norm, showed the actual meridian to be about 100 metres away from the brass line and the 'ticket area'. Something to do with earth curvature and various map datums. We use the WGS84 datum which is an average, whereas the British Grid is obviously more acurate in Britain. Something like that anyway!!

 

Anyone else found this as well? or explain it any better!!

 

Dave

In the words of the Royal Observatory Greenwich The answer :ph34r:

(The Ordnance Survey use a different meridian again BTW (5.79m West) which was centred on one of the earlier meridians than the current Airy Transit "zero." GPS meridian is 102.51m East)

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I do a lot of non-cache-hunting walking and the reason that I initially bought a GPS was not do much for locating things but to work out exactly how far I'd covered in a day. Of course, I hadn't had it very long before I discovered caching.

 

For the day job I sometimes get involved in installing GPS/mapping equipment in vehicles. Once or twice I've had units that had trouble getting a fix, and I found the skymap feature on my Etrex useful for assessing whether the problem was likely to lie with the equipment or simply because satellites were likely to be out of view/obscured by buildings.

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I originally got mine to measure speed and distanc on a skiing holiday.

 

I considered buying two Garmin Rino units - walkie talkies with GPS capability, so that if we got separated I could see my wifes location as well as listen to her tell me where she was (I'm in a snowy valley!).

 

I could also see if she was far enough away to sneak in another gluwein

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I've seen a GPS receiver used to keep the computer network time server constantly updated. This was at a top secret MOD establishment somewhere near Newbury.

 

I also use mine to check the accuracy of my car speedo, which over reads by about 10%.

Edited by NickPick
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