NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: News Item on Over-reliance on GPS
From: Dan Allen
Date: 2008 Nov 27, 19:50 -0700
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From: Dan Allen
Date: 2008 Nov 27, 19:50 -0700
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 10:19 PM, <frankreed@historicalatlas.net> wrote:
We have all heard reports of GPS "systems" failing, but those are usually integrated charting applications with many sensitive components and the GPS read-out is frequently just a small part.
I have mentioned it before, but I once had a Garmin GPS12 die on me while driving across eastern Washington state. It was sitting on my dash on a bean bag-style mount, working fine and then it froze. I had not touched it. There were no lightning strikes. It just spontaneously died, never to recover. All attempts at rebooting it failed. I had to send it to Garmin and they sent me a new unit.
It was not an integrated charting application. It was a rugged 4 AA cell handheld Garmin. I have owned at least six or eight Garmin GPS units over the years, in many form factors and all have worked very well. To be fair this failure incident was in the mid 1990s when Garmin was still quite new.
If this had happened at sea it could have caused problems if that was all I had. A few years later when I had my boats I made sure I had several GPS units -- and a sextant.
Dan
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