
NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Calculators for Navigation
From: Dan Allen
Date: 1999 Mar 12, 13:21 EST
From: Dan Allen
Date: 1999 Mar 12, 13:21 EST
Personally I prefer to spend my time doing lots of programming on my HP-48GX to get sight reduction to the fewest keystrokes! The HP 48 uses very little power and has great built-in functionality. It has a strange programming language called RPL (Reverse Polish Lisp) but it is quite powerful. Sadly HP is doing very little with calculators any more. My best nav programs are written in the C programming language and run on my laptops, although I am about to port them to a small HP620LX Windows CE machine... which is what HP is putting its efforts to now. At least these machines can be programmed in C -- a big step forward -- but they do not support much programming on the machine: you need to write the programs on a desktop machine running Windows 98 or NT. I've begun experimenting with some nav software written as an Excel spreadsheet, and it actually works quite well. These Handheld PCs that run Windows CE (like the HP620LX and their newer Jornada) have a Pocket Excel in ROM and one CAN program on the handheld machine in Excel simply by writing formulas. (No macros or VBA yet though.) One of the great advantages of using Excel for numerical calculations is that you can see as much of your intermediate results as you want along the way. You can change just one variable and see how it affects the answer, etc. Writing nav software using Excel is actually pretty promising! Dan danallen@XXX.XXX -----Original Message----- From: Mike Wescott [mailto:mike.wescott@XXX.XXX] Sent: Friday, March 12, 1999 6:18 AM To: Titanium Tom Cc: Dan Hogan; navigation@XXX.XXX Subject: Re: [Nml] Silicon Sea II: Show of Hands > What type of calculator is the best for working the calculations, should it be > programable? Personally, I prefer minimal computer help for doing the Silicon Sea problems (and maximal help on the open sea). I use a simple calculator and plotting sheets. If I weren't too lazy to use an Ageton method (or one of it's relatives, I would do without the calculator. <PRE> -- -Mike Wescott mike.wescott@XXX.XXX =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= =-= TO UNSUBSCRIBE, send this message to majordomo@XXX.XXX: =-= =-= unsubscribe navigation =-= =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= </PRE>