NavList:

I recently crossed from NYC to Southampton on the Queen Mary and never having used a sextant on a big ship I brought a 3/4 size Simex and my iPhone along. I thought I would check my celestial against that device's GPS. I was surprised to find the ships location, course and speed updated every few minutes on the TV in the cabin. The cabin faced south, was right behind the bridge and on the same level, 190 above the waterline. I found it very, very easy to get good sights, not any different from using a sextant on the beach really but with a better defined horizon. Nowhere near as difficult as my small cruising sailboat and consequently got fixes within .4' of the positions reported from the bridge. This sextant isn't my favorite but is small, light, accurate and easy to pack inside a suit case. My iPhone has a few navigation apps on it, I like "SightCalc'" but I was disappointed to find the GPS stopped working about 800 miles into the journey and didn't pick up sat signals again until about 300 miles from the Western Approaches. Presumably the ship was picking up signals but of course it has millions of dollars worth of navigation equipment. I spoke to some officers coming off the bridge and they said they never used sextants and didn't even know if there were any aboard. Makes one feel like an idiot to be messing around with obsolete nonsense.
Nial
----------------------------------------------------------------
NavList message boards and member settings: www.fer3.com/NavList
Members may optionally receive posts by email.
To cancel email delivery, send a message to NoMail[at]fer3.com
----------------------------------------------------------------