4 ms·
I mean you already need a working phone and gps. Why would there ever have been an alternative
by Avshalom 6y ago
I mean you already need a working phone and gps. Why would there ever have been an alternative
- 4wsn 6y agoI don't know, I'm not a rescuer. I assume having someone communicate "49,9842159, 10,1134713" over a staticy radio signal is harder than using something like this.
- rozab 6y agoThat's a huge false equivalency since that number of decimal places gives your location to 1cm accuracy
- theamk 6y agoI don't think anyone says we should have the coordinates -- there are many other systems which are open and not patent encumbered. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words lists all the problems with the system as well as provides some alternatives. I personally like "plus codes": for your location it would be X4M7+M9 . Over a noisy channel, "xray four mike seven" is much easier to recognize correctly than difference between "steak" and "stake", especially if the person is not a native english speaker.
- snypher 6y agoPlenty of people don't know how to show their grid coordinates on their phone, outside of dropping a google maps 'pin', which doesn't work great offline.