There has been some interest in my posting more of my travel experiences. I found this entry in an account of my flight to Buenos Aires preparatory to my cruise around Cape Horn.
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In 1992, I purchased a handheld Trimble GPS receiver, slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes with six buttons on it. If it has received signals from at least three satellites and you push the right button, it will give you a ‘fix’ showing the latitude, longitude, altitude, and the time and date when the fix was generated.
These fixes can help you find a car in a huge field at an airshow, or find your way back to a hotel in an unfamiliar city, or the right direction off the Acropolis when the sun is almost directly overhead, but they also make little ‘souvenirs’ as it were, and I think some of the ones I have gotten are pretty neat. Because battery failures in the past have lost some of my older ones, I have decided to list the current ones here now, not to impress anybody, but because (a) I DO think some of them are neat and (b) it will leave some kind of a record if the thing loses the fixes once again.
The reason this is in my mind is because I crossed the equator last night, and in the eight previous crossings, I had never gotten a ‘fix’ and last night I did. I am particularly chuffed because I had figured out almost exactly when it would happen, woke myself somehow and got it in the dark. It goes nicely with the one taken on the Zero Degree Longitude line in Greenwich, England.
Acapulco; Anchorage, Buenos Aires, St Barts, Belize, Berlin, Block Island, Bora Bora, Cabo San Lucas, Calgary, Cancun, Capetown, Churchill, Cozumel, Costa Rica, Cape Verde, Detroit, Duxford, Equator, Gaton Lake, Greenwich, Home, Houston, Johannesburg, Katmai, Kuwait, LA, London, Malta, Milan, Ottawa, Peking, Guam, Honolulu, Princeton, Raleigh, Roatan, Honduras; King Salmon, Alaska; San Marco Plaza; Saskatchewan, Seattle, Sofia, St Maarten, Tahiti, Tokyo, Toronto, Venice, Virgin Gorda, Vienna, Warsaw, Winnipeg and Xuantanich [those of you who looked at the pix in Westy’s site will know that one].
I will not dwell on the fact that I have ‘lost’ an equal number of neat sounding places before these!.
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5 comments:
Hmmmm...
I think one can fix their position via facebook these days although I have not done it..
I remain VERY cautious about what personal info I put on the book of faces.
That's quite a list. Seems like a good device since it is not too large ad it is self contained. You control where the info goes.
It was one of my favorites! Great story once, standing in front of my hotel in Kathmandu playing with it, and a Lufthansa captain came by to look.
"Dot thing does more than $200,000 vurth of equipment on our dashboard" he quoth. So I told him I'd be in row 29 if he needed a hand if he was the one flying us to Frankfort in the morning.
As it turned out, he was, and he did call me forward to put the gps on the glareshield to check its output against that of the A330.
Always gives me pause therefore when some mincing FA tells me I need to turn off a gps because it could affect the flight of the airliner.
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