NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Pocket Sextant Found!
From: Dan Allen
Date: 1997 Jul 22, 9:41 AM
From: Dan Allen
Date: 1997 Jul 22, 9:41 AM
Hey this mailing list is pretty slick! I was able to not only learn more about the Francis Barker and Son Pocket Sextant that I asked this group about, but I found the last brand new one available, thanks to Ken at Celestaire. It is a slick little unit. My sextant collection just grew by 50%, to 3. Q: Does the Navy still buy new sextants? Are the Mark 2 and Mark 3 sextants still made? Who makes them? How do they compare to other modern sextants, like an Astra IIIb? Q: C. Plath once showed a picture of a sextant with a built-in calculator, circa 1985-87. I never saw it go into production. Does anyone know anything more about this sextant and why they never made it a production unit? It would be really neat to get a small microprocessor and put it into a sextant. With the proper programming you could get a fix without any calculations or input. Just add a twin-quartz clock for high time accuracy, some sort of transducer measuring the degree of angle that the sextant was in and you could calculate angles without regard to horizon, and you could have a really neat SELF-CONTAINED competitor to GPS! I'd be glad to write the software if someone knew the hardware end of things... Dan Daniel K. Allen [N47� 38.592' W122� 7.309' == Building 32] danallen@microsoft.com Sent using Outlook and Windows NT Server 4.0 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= =-= TO UNSUBSCRIBE, send this message to majordomo@ronin.com: =-= =-= navigation =-= =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=