Pencil, Paper and Stars
The Handbook of Traditional and Emergency Navigation
Chapter One
An excellent
art
Navigation is that excellent Art, which demonstrateth by infallible conclusions, how
a sufficient Ship may be conducted the shortest good way from place to place, by
Table and Travers.
John Davis, The Seaman's Secrets, 1594
Electronics took its time killing traditional navigation. The first hint of its intentions
was in 1906 when the Italians Bellini and Tosi found how to determine the direction
from which radio signals were transmitted. By the end of the 1940s radio navigation
had grown to include Consol, Decca, Loran-C (the Russians had their version called
Chayka), and Omega, the son of a 1940s development called Radux and the first
worldwide positioning system. It even had its own differential system for improved
accuracy and was switched off only in 1997. It is hard to believe that only 30 years
ago hi-tech, electronic navigation for most yachtsmen was donning a set of headphones
and waving a glorified tran ... read full excerpt from Pencil, Paper and Stars: The Handbook of Traditional and Emergency Navigation ebook
