Re: Navigation

[SJSVOB@aol.com]

<<But there may be a different way: how well would GPS work?   Pop up
a mast with the antenna on it, and read your location off the internal
chart.    Works on inland lakes, too.>>

I was attending a seminar on celestial navigation at the boat show in Chicago 
last winter.  I met a gentleman who served on submarines and he informed me 
of a special periscope the Navy has used that was capable of taking 
declination measurements of celestial bodies while the submarine is at 
periscope depth.  The accuracy of the fix was within 1 1/2 miles.  The 
gentleman also told me that he was interested in building a submarine, I 
refered him to the PSUBS website.

I have a Motorola Encore GPS Receiver which I have interfaced to my PC.  I've 
written my own mapping application so I can scan in any map and plot my 
position on it.  I can scan in topo maps, maritime charts, road maps, etc.  I 
can scan in multiple maps of the same, or disparate areas, so I can switch on 
the fly from one map to another.  Before anyone asks for a copy however, I 
wrote it for Macintosh.  Maybe one of these days I will port it to Visual 
Basic.  If anyone wants to read more about it they may at: 
http://members.aol.com/sjsvob/NavPlotter.html

As a side note the program also digitizes video and displays it in a seperate 
window.  Nice for connecting to a televised periscope.

Steve