4 ms·

I did the Duke of Edinburgh bronze silver and gold when I was a kid, back before smart phones. Only one person on the team could reliably navigate, and he was m

I did the Duke of Edinburgh bronze silver and gold when I was a kid, back before smart phones. Only one person on the team could reliably navigate, and he was mostly just basing his assessment on our position using compass and tree line. They taught us to triangulate using pencil and ruler, but no one has time for that when it's starting to get dark.

closewith 2y ago
> They taught us to triangulate using pencil and ruler, but no one has time for that when it's starting to get dark. I was a military land nav instructor (although not for the US military) and this was one of our biggest challenges, especially once smart phones become common. People would consider position fixing to be an unbearable waste of time and would inevitably waste hours of time and effort because of it.
- dmos62 2y ago
  Sad story. A few weeks ago, a few US tankmen got lost in a Lithuanian training grounds driving a M88 recovery vehicle. They drowned in a swamp. Took most of a week to find and excavate them (they were under meters of mud). Last I heard the investigation is ongoing, but a theory is that their GPS was malfunctioning due to Russian or Belorussian GPS jamming and the crew failed to navigate without GPS. Russian GPS jamming is a constant occurance in the region and training happened near the Belorussian border.
  - red_admiral 2y ago
    Isn't the Navy going back to teaching sextants and astral navigation, just in case in a conflict the enemy interferes with GPS? On land, I always carry a paper map while hiking and have a bit of a, shall we say, opinion of people who neither take a map nor could competently use it if they needed to. Especially on multi-day mountain walks with a night in a hut along the way.
    - giraffe_lady 2y ago
      I don't know about the standard navy officer school but the naval academy only stopped teaching it for like a ten year period and then brought it back. Funny enough though serious rec sailors are the most likely to know it well I think. They are much more likely to be in a situation where it's necessary and they have fewer shipboard obligations compared to a naval officer so more time/boredom to use futzing with it. It does take practice.
    - closewith 2y ago
      I'm now a SAR navigator on a lifeboat and we now have a renewed focus on manual navigation as skills atrophied due to reliance on GPS plotting. While GPS in our AOR is rock solid, our plotters are not and frequently unavailable.
  - nradov 2y ago
    That's entirely possible. I use Strava a lot and sometimes challenges or segment leaderboards show activities that are obviously invalid. And then when you look at the details you see bizarre GPS (GNSS) tracks in Eastern Europe or Russia that are characteristic of jamming or spoofing. GPS is great but it's really dangerous to rely on it for primary navigation.

closewith 2y ago

> They taught us to triangulate using pencil and ruler, but no one has time for that when it's starting to get dark. I was a military land nav instructor (although not for the US military) and this was one of our biggest challenges, especially once smart phones become common. People would consider position fixing to be an unbearable waste of time and would inevitably waste hours of time and effort because of it.

dmos62 2y ago
Sad story. A few weeks ago, a few US tankmen got lost in a Lithuanian training grounds driving a M88 recovery vehicle. They drowned in a swamp. Took most of a week to find and excavate them (they were under meters of mud). Last I heard the investigation is ongoing, but a theory is that their GPS was malfunctioning due to Russian or Belorussian GPS jamming and the crew failed to navigate without GPS. Russian GPS jamming is a constant occurance in the region and training happened near the Belorussian border.
- red_admiral 2y ago
  Isn't the Navy going back to teaching sextants and astral navigation, just in case in a conflict the enemy interferes with GPS? On land, I always carry a paper map while hiking and have a bit of a, shall we say, opinion of people who neither take a map nor could competently use it if they needed to. Especially on multi-day mountain walks with a night in a hut along the way.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    I don't know about the standard navy officer school but the naval academy only stopped teaching it for like a ten year period and then brought it back. Funny enough though serious rec sailors are the most likely to know it well I think. They are much more likely to be in a situation where it's necessary and they have fewer shipboard obligations compared to a naval officer so more time/boredom to use futzing with it. It does take practice.
  - closewith 2y ago
    I'm now a SAR navigator on a lifeboat and we now have a renewed focus on manual navigation as skills atrophied due to reliance on GPS plotting. While GPS in our AOR is rock solid, our plotters are not and frequently unavailable.
- nradov 2y ago
  That's entirely possible. I use Strava a lot and sometimes challenges or segment leaderboards show activities that are obviously invalid. And then when you look at the details you see bizarre GPS (GNSS) tracks in Eastern Europe or Russia that are characteristic of jamming or spoofing. GPS is great but it's really dangerous to rely on it for primary navigation.