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Around the turn of the millennium, when the US Navy made a big push to
adopt ECDIS, an interview with the Deputy Navigator of the Navy was
published in a Navy IT magazine. I found one thing she said rather
surprising:

"In November 1995, the IMO issued a resolution entitled Electronic
Charting Display and Information System (ECDIS) that set the
requirements that commercial vessels had to meet to safely replace paper
charts with digital charts displayed on interactive computer systems...
When we reviewed the civil specifications, we determined that we could
use it with only minor modifications that included... the ability to
plot lines of positioning and to navigate the ship using dead reckoning..."

Huh? The civil ECDIS standard didn't provide for DR and plotting of LOPs?

http://www.doncio.navy.mil/CHIPS/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=3167


In contradiction, a comparison chart in this Naval Postgraduate School
thesis, "Electronic Chart Display and Information System-Navy: analysis
and recommendations," says all the systems accept celestial inputs and
can do running fixes and dead reckoning.

The author estimates a typical Navy ship needs about 500 paper charts
per year just for updates. Outfitting a new ship requires several
thousand charts, he says.

http://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/10894

Anyone have details on how celestial inputs are fed into an ECDIS? I
suppose a minimum implementation would let you input as assumed
position, bearing of the body, and the intercept (distance toward or
away). It would then draw a LOP. An elaborate implementation might
include an almanac and automatic sight reduction.


In 2001 the Navy issued a message about their plans to put ECDIS on a
fast track. Paragraph 10 is interesting:

10.  NAVTIP: A PC/WINDOWS-BASED SOFTWARE SYSTEM TO ESTIMATE LATITUDE
AND LONGITUDE ASTRONOMICALLY (STELLA 2.0) PROVIDES A STANDARD,
AUTOMATED MEANS OF PERFORMING CELESTIAL NAVIGATION COMPUTATIONS.
ORDERING INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE FROM THE NAVIGATOR OF THE NAVY
WEBSITE.  REF E REQUIRES MAINTAINING SHIPBOARD PROFICIENCY IN
CELESTIAL NAVIGATION.

However, there's no Reference E in the message. The list of references
only goes up to D.

http://www.public.navy.mil/bupers-npc/reference/messages/Documents/NAVADMINS/NAV2001/nav01178.txt

   

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