Quantum compass

[Makwa]

I can't wait until we get to argue about this technological advance on the forum. It is in the early stages right now but pretty cool anyway. Someday we won't have to rely on connecting with GPS satellites to navigate.

https://news.yahoo.com/tech/quantum-compasses-closer-replacing-gps-110000557.html

[Nessmuk]

The paper speaks of a tremendous amount of theory and manufacturing challenges. I worked for 20 years as a photonics engineer and program manager of emerging DoD technology contracts at a government research laboratory. Lots of promises both internally and contracted, most by far going unrealized.

Prior to that I was an Air Force navigator, long before GPS was in any way deployed. I was a dedicated detailed map and compass and sextant navigator. For some detailed complex flight missions, a new technology with a footlocker sized box was installed which provided an inertial navigation system with coordinate readouts similar to what you can get with GPS today. However, it required many minutes of careful calibration prior to flight, and after hours of flight its expected coordinate drift accuracy was claimed at 1.9miles/hour, often worse in my experience. At times I simply ignored the device as obviously wrong and relied on old school Dead Reckoning along with my trusty sextant and celestial calculations generated from my own programmed TI-59 calculator, the most advanced hand held at the time.

[SeaLevel]

How nice to hear of someone who knows of and how to use a sextant, sight reduction tables and what the interpolation for declination minutes are! As a sailor, on a slow moving sailboat, I cannot fathom how an Air Force navigator (thank you for your service to our country) could get a fix in a fast moving airplane, even with preloading your sextant with approximate readings. Having sailed offshore and at night, when approaching a port of destination, we would often look for the "lume" on the horizon (or in today's jargon the "light polution" of an island. Loran came along and with today's GPS technology, we are probably dinosaurs of navigational aids. FlyFishingandBeer's land based discussion of early navigation are the tools Colvin and Blake used in the ADK's. Thanks for resurrecting memories of years past!

[FlyFishingandBeer]

That's a pretty wild concept. We learned non-GPS navigation via dead reckoning and triangulation. I once did a little exercise with an old hiking buddy where we checked my old Foretrex 301 on a densely overcast day and compared it to triangulation using map, compass, and protractor. I was able to complete the "analog" triangulation faster than the GPS could latch on to enough satellites to give a rudimentary position, and my triangulated location was more accurate. This was only about a decade ago. The idea that we could soon carry something the size of my Fenix 5X, that is able to accurately give position and navigational data without the messy variability of satellites just goes to show that we haven't even scratched the surface in regard to where this tech is headed.

[Makwa]

Back in 2009-10 I used a first gen Garmin eTrex. I would turn it on the second I parked and then hoped it would locate enough satellites by time I geared up and got moving 10-15 minutes later. It was about a 50% proposition that it would be tracking by then. On any climb the elevation never updated correctly. There was always a huge lag. It was always your best guess as to what ele you were at. Then late in the day (any time after around 4 pm) I would regularly lose signals when I was at low elevation.

I only carried the thing to plot a few waypoints to know how far I was to the next trail junction or summit or parking area. Thankfully, I never needed it in any emergency situation given the unreliability.

We have come a long way since. And someday we won't even need the satellites.

[FlyFishingandBeer]

Makwa I still occasionally have the same issue with my Fenix 5X. It typically locks onto satellites pretty quickly, much faster than my 301 would, but it'll occasionally "lose track" of my elevation during hikes. For example when I hiked Esther/WF with NBFS a couple of years ago, it was saying our elevation at the Esther junction was ~3200 feet. That's a solid 700 foot margin of error that shouldn't be an issue with modern tech, but somehow still is.

EDIT: btw, one way to eliminate "location lag" when using a GPS, is to turn it on much sooner than you think you'll need to. If you have the means of using a dedicated unit for hiking in a specific area, such as the HPW, only turn it on while in that area. changing locations between powering these devices on/off seems to confuse them and makes them much more susceptible to having trouble locking on to satellites. We used to occasionally have the same issue without our military GPS systems, and those were supposed to be far more advanced then consumer products... which is questionable.

[Nessmuk]

SeaLevel, i had a certain advantage as a USAF navigator. Ever since I was about ten.years old, I was fascinated by astronomy and had studied the stars from my small town dark sky location in northern NY State. The list of 51 standard navigation stars I was asked to memorize in AF training were already well known to me by relative location with respect to other stars, color, and brightness. Pre-calculations are done for the projected time down track at the predetermined time of the sextant shot. The bubble sextant takes a two minute average of the star's elevation centered on the designated calculation time. Three stars are measured in quick succession and their LOP is adjusted to a common time for a small triangle fix point. I had good pilots who could keep the aircraft steady enough for me to take a shot within an arcminute of accuracy, resulting in one or two nautical miles of accuracy unless there was turbulence.

I did not much care for the inertial navigation system (INS) when I had one installed. as It was a distraction with its often random wanderings and extra work to keep it aligned and monitored, but when it was working properly, it did build confidence in my celestial calculations early in the mission. But as the hours passed, it would drift and become runreliable. Note that when the Soviets shot down Korean passenger plane KAL007, it was thought that a mistaken INS waypoint entry may have taken them off course over Kamchatka without a means of a secondary navigation check, and the Soviets may have thought it was a USAF reconnaissance intelligence gatherer (RC-135) , such as the type I refueled over the arctic.

Note that the GPS internal algorithm, in order to give the best possible horizontal location on the surface of the earth, it gives up some accuracy in elevation above the surface, often making the elevation reading somewhat unreliable..

[SeaLevel]

Thank you for elaborating on your experience, makes maritime navigation look like child's play! May I assume you got your fixes while shooting through an astrodome? If so and while flying over the artic, I would imagine an astrodome could be quite chilly. (If you don't mind, could you comment to my question in your reply to "What's your ride"?) Thanks again - SeaLevel

[Nessmuk]

No astrodome on a KC-135. There is a very small port that slides open, about 1.5 inches in diameter in the top of the fuselage, just big enough to fit the sextant periscope tube that slides up and locks into place, so I stay warm in the crew cabin, standing right behind my chair while viewing through the sextant, The arctic also offers another kind of navigation aid. On the way out, heading north from Alaska toward the NP and beyond, I could map the ice ridges from my radar and draw them onto my chart. Upon our return, I could follow the lines and recognize the kinks in the ice that I had drawn. Also, at the time the trans-Alaska pipeline was going in and huge stacks of metal pipe were piled on the coastline at Point Barrow. Those pipes lit up my radar like nothing else than a beacon from 200 miles out. Meanwhile, the pilots without much to do are asking "Hey Nav, how ya doin, do you need another sandwich from my lunch box?"

[SeaLevel]

Thanks for your continued elaboration of your navigational experiences. While coastal navigation always uses landmarks, it is interesting that you could use ice ridges as a "local landmark" and navigational aid. I am sure you got a great ping off the metal pipes as well as how your pilots appreciated you getting them back to base! You sound like a natural to teach a mountaineering navigational course. When hiking, my map is always in my thigh pocket with anticipated compass bearings!

[Nessmuk]

Well Sea Level, since you asked.... sorry this is going to sound like a land nav resume.
I in fact spent the last half of my 9 years of active duty as a flight crew navigator instructor and a flight check evaluator. Turns out that air and land navigation are not that much different at the base level of thought. So, after (and during) that, every chance I had I improved my land nav skills with off-trail trips on remote pond bushwhacks, mostly in the western Adirondack lowlands.

I spent the past 30 years training wilderness guides, including annual BSA high adventure Adirondack wilderness adult trek leader training at BSA National Camping School, with my specialties in land nav and canoeing. For just as long I have been teaching state SAR volunteer team members a course in land nav.

Several years ago, my state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services hired me as a Subject Matter Expert to teach a formal land navigation course for law enforcement, fire, SAR, EMS and other agency personnel.

[SeaLevel]

How often do we read a SAR of someone losing their bearings and not being able to recover by understanding the landscape around them. Glad to hear that both your passion as well as knowledge is being shared with others. I am sure all you have interacted with have come out stronger because of the your experiences and insights from the practical application what you have learned over the years.