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How GPS Is Killing Lighthouses
sakshale writes "Spiegel Online has an article about the impact of GPS systems on Lighthouses.
They claim that the popularity of the satellite-based global positioning system has led to the closure of lighthouses along the German coast." As the article says, "critics question whether the new system is reliable and safe enough to warrant the closure of these historical beacons of safety."
Isn't GPS run by the United States government? Are other countries sure it's a good idea to be relying on that?
Lighthouses have been obsolete since radar came to be. GPS is hardly the starting point for this. At any rate, I'm a fan of lighthouse preservation efforts as I think they're a very interesting part of our evolution of navagational technology, and, in some cases, quite beautiful. Lighthouses have been pretty well obsolete for 40 years.
Although the lighthouses really aren't needed, do they really cost so much for upkeep to where it's not cost effective to keep the system running as a backup? I would imagine that it would be very nice to still have lighthouses should a ship suddenly find its GPS no longer working.
...as tourist attractions. In fact the actual light and other equipment has been automated for years. Many navigational beacons are solar powered, and almost maintenance free.
says money isn't the only reason, the shipping companies and possibly governments have no reason other than money to want to see them gone.
And for what? 400k euro/year? Granted, that's only for 15 lighthouses, but that's peanuts compared to what is spent on other things.
I wonder what a supertanker spill would cost to clean up, after there's a power failure onboard and the GPS nav systems are offline, and there aren't any lighthouses to use as backups.
FTA: "For one thing, GPS can never be 100 percent reliable -- extreme weather conditions like hail or snowfall or even solar winds are known to disrupt service."
I'm just wondering - couldn't those same factors affect a captain's visibility to a lighthouse?
I don't think that all lighthouses are in immediate danger of closure. This from the The National Lighthouse museum:
"With all of the advances made in electronic navigation over the last half century, the use of lighthouses as aids to navigation has certainly waned. The Global Positioning System (GPS), in particular, has transformed the art of navigation to electronic methods. Lighthouses are still used by ships as a back up to their satellite navigation aids, however, and they are used by small boats that aren't equipped with the necessary navigational electronics. Some lighthouses, which are used as range lights are still as important today as they ever were."
The Staten Island Lighthouse, for example, is the rear range light for the Ambrose Channel Range, the primary deep-draft channel into New York Harbor, and remains of vital importance to New York marine traffic."
Here's an ironic twist too: Using a GPS to find a lighthouse.
And: The GPS coordinates of many lighthouses.
I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me.
After being a quartermaster in the US Navy and navigating a large ship through some particular odd parts of the world where the GPS saturation is not enough to use, so that it is as reliable enough to pinpoint within a meter, I can say that lighthouse triangulation is way more accurate, and electronics will eventually fail. The Navy still uses sextants just incase all power is lost and there is no land available.
One word:
Fallback.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
This reminds me of the parable:
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Please elaborate on how you did this. Because results like this are practically unheard of.
What ephemeredes were you using (an what models did they use)? How many states was your kalman filter? What antenna technology were you using? What were you multipath correction algorithms? How long were you collects? Any DGPS source? What were your atmospherics? What about you clock drift corrections?
Was this a static or dynamic location?
Even if you know the position of you ground station down to that level, it is nearly impossible to converge a solution using any GPS source using traditional filtering techniques (that is unless you weight the known position to 100% I mean, changes of the antenna temperature and the density of the troposphere due to humidity can cause errors of a centimeter.
Please elaborate. If you can tell us how you did this, you'll have a wonderful, cushy job at the IGS (http://igscb.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html) for the rest of your life...
Ah yes, the old "personal responsibility" excuse... Tell you what: I'll be personally responsible for my course corrections; if you'll be personally responsible for the weather, wind, current shifts and any of a dozen other unforeseen events that delay my sailboat an hour past expected arrival with sunlight? What, you can't be personally responsible for such events of nature that are beyond perfectly accurate prediction according to chaos theory?
Think of actual circumstances before you foist this "enlightened" crap on people, whom I'll wager, have spent more time boating than you have.
here endeth my rant.
How much do you like getting one of those email greeting cards? It's a really big thrill isn't it?
Sig, we don't need no stinking Sig!
I don't know about you guys, but I keep candels in my drawer for when my light bulbs go out.
Light houses might just be a good thing to keep around.
Exactly. My dad is a sailor/shipwright, and I remember an example he gave me when commercial GPS was still really new. His ship was docked when he happened to check the GPS (I think he was in either Sydney or Christchurch NZ). The GPS showed the boat was sitting on land in the middle of one of the big streets that ran beside the pier, a few hundred meters from the actual location. The GPS turned out to be far more accurate than the charts. This is getting to be less and less of a problem as cartographers use GPS to update their maps, and admittedly the error was still small enough that it wouldn't be a problem in most situations. But, again, your GPS is only as good as its maps, and cartographers are only human. Also, my dad later ran a marine electronics shop in Seattle. That's a whole other can of beans. After helping my dad try to fix GPS/radar/other navigation systems and seeing just how screwed up they can get, I would highly recommend that all aspiring sailors learn how to use the sextants in their emergency kits.
Never trust a physicist further than his DeBroglie wavelength.