NavList:

I think that any competent navigator uses a combination of electronic, visual, and celestial navigation tools to bring the vessel from point A to point B without mishap.  The "voting arrangement" you refer to should be the navigator's brain.  If someone is going to rely on yet another machine to decide which data to utilize, that person can find him/herself in serious trouble.

 

A good example of this was yesterday.  I was navigating over a seamount with all applicable navaids running.  When I was over the seamount, my depth sounder read 210 feet.  When I was over 1000+ feet of water, it read 10 feet.   I knew the echo was false because i knew my position by DR, radar, GPS, soundings from the seamount, and visual bearings on a nearby island.  No voting machine was necessary to tell me that the depth sounder was giving me false returns.  I knew exactly what navaids were the most likely to be in error and why, and ignored the data provided by them.

 

Jeremy

 

An obvious but not so easy approach might be to combine a number of systems, maybe GPS, eLoran, inertial, ADF, coastal recognition, celestial and DR. A voting arrangement with emphasis modified to what's reliable at the time would make jamming less important.

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