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I fear to wade in here on plastic sextants but...

A number of years ago (1997?) Cruising World did a
comparison of a range of sextants. Whilst not
statistically robust the outcomes were interesting.

From memory (magazine at home) the design was 3 people
taking it in turns to take sights with a range of
sextants. The sights were taken from dry land and GPS
position was used as the AP. Accuracy of the sight was
taken to be the intercept.

The sextants involved were C&P Horizon Ultra, Astra
IIIB, C Plath Navistar Traditional, an older C Plath,
a Freiberger Drum and 2 Davis plastic sextants.

There were a couple of anomalies, one of which was
that one of the sight takers was a woman and it
appeared that she had difficulty getting accuracy with
the heavier sextants. Her own sextant was the
Freiberger and with that she was most accurate.

In summary (again from memory)the outcomes were around
1-2 miles intercept for the C&P, 3-7 miles intercept
for the other metal sextants, and between 12 and 23
miles for the two Davis plastic sextants. Whilst there
may be small anomalies in my memory of the numbers I
think that I have been faithful in my recollection and
certainly the order of magnitude of the plastic
sextant errors is pretty right.

Make what you will of that.

Regards

Mike

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