Finding your way
For many years the only way to know where you were and where you were going was by stars and sextant. This was accurate only by the skill of the “star gazer”.
In time, the radio was introduced to the world and direction finders were developed and position could be located, and given time an automatic direction finder evolved, this kept a needle or other device pointed to the station with several stations you could locate your position with reasonable accuracy.
Next to evolve was LORAN A Long range aid to navigation, Transmitters were placed around the coast and receivers were used to measure the time difference between the signals, where the two time differences intersected you were supposed to be. This went from manual to automatic track and displayed on a screen of some type and still read out in time difference.
The big development in loran A, was the introduction of the latitude longitude converter, this actually gave you your position in LAT/LONG, much easier to use with a map. Technology keeps improving and allows us to know where we are at.
Now we are in the seventies, and along comes Loran C, this is a bit more advanced and with the Lat Long Converters developed for Loran A and the automatic features, gave us a more accurate locating device, still though it really was only good for telling us where we were at, it was up to us to figure how to get to another location, at least we knew where we were at.
During some of this time, the Department of Defense was working on something called Satellite Navigation for ships and aircraft, they started with two or three in orbit and that seemed to work so they added more, then more, by now there are about 30, some active some resting, if one goes out another can be turned on while the other one is electronically tested and adjusted. This takes us out of the dark ages into the late tweneth century.
I don’t know who and could care less the company that put the first commercial GPS on the marked but giving GARMIN a plug, there unit was introduced in Aircraft form late 80’s and early 90’s. These were expensive but easy to operate and told you where you were at and if you put in another location would tell you what direction to fly and how far you were from your destination. Later they added lots more “JUNK” but they took off like wildfire.
From that day till now they have added more lines, from handhelds, Hiking, phone gps cars both installed and dash mount. These units give you your location on a map, keeps track where you are and where you are going. The GPS does everything except think for you! It only knows the many routes you could take to get to your destination. Your new friend, has no idea the condition of the route, only that it was there at one time. THUS if you use a GPS, also use your HEAD!
The accuracy of this writing is not guaranteed to be accurate, only the fact that if you don’t use your HEAD with your GPS, you may not have use for it later.
