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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."
How e-mail is killing the sales of postage stamps.
"There is no spoon."
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.
As such, the U.S. military can turn off the satelites or scramble their signal whenever it deems appropriate. So, before our friends the Germans decide to become overly dependant on U.S. technology, they ought to ensure that the world is a stable place otherwise they may find themselves hung out to dry on the reef.
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.
Lighthouse makers just need to move to a new "all-lawsuit" model of revenue like the music and movie industry has. GPS is denying lighthouse makers their constitutionally protected right to obscene amounts of profit. If you're using a GPS, you're stealing from lighthouses*. It's as simple as that.
* or, if you prefer, copyright infringing from lighthouses.
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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.
the moment satellites or the gps system fails, we'll get something like: Believe it or not...this is the transcript of an actual radio conversation between a US naval ship and Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland in October 1995. The Radio conversation was released by the Chief of Naval Operations on Oct. 10, 1995. US Ship: Please divert your course 0.5 degrees to the south to avoid a collision. CND reply: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision. US Ship: This is the Captain of a US Navy Ship. I say again, divert your course. CND reply: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course! US Ship: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS CORAL SEA*, WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF THE US NAVY. DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW!! CND reply: This is a lighthouse. Your call.
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Ocean Navigator carried an article a few years ago about how the number of people "lost at sea" reported by the US Coast Guard had *increased* since GPS was invented!
The typical response to was "the batteries went flat...". Hmmmm. Point taken re postage stamps and email but this is a lives-at-stake situation.
BTW, this is also why the US Navy still teaches celestial navigation and morse code.
Stevo
Forget the truth. Science is fact.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Lighthouses are dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered lighthouse community when IDC confirmed that the lighthouse market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all navigational assistance tools. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that lighthouses have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Lighthouses are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Ship Admin comprehensive navigational test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict the future of lighthouses. The hand writing is on the wall: lighthouses faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for lighthouses because lighthouses are dying. Things are looking very bad for lighthouses. As many of us are already aware, lighthouses continue to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. A river with no lighthosue.
FreeLighthouse is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time lighthouse developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: lighthouses are dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Openlighthouse leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of Openlighthouse. How many users of Netlighthouse are there? Let's see. The number of Openlighthouse versus Netlighthouse posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Netlighthouse users. lighthouse/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Netlighthouse posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of lighthouse/OS. A recent article put Freelighthouse at about 80 percent of the *lighthouse market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Freelighthouse users. This is consistent with the number of Freelighthouse Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Freelighthouse went out of business and was taken over by lighthouseI who sell another troubled OS. Now lighthouseI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *lighthouse has steadily declined in market share. lighthouses are very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If lighthouses are to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *lighthouse continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, lighthouses are dead.
Fact: Lighthouses are dying
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
... is what Europe came up with, as an answer to your question.
l ileo/index_en.htm
...but the yanks are not happy....
http://www.esa.int/export/esaNA/galileo.html
http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/energy_transport/ga
China seems to agree
Lighthouses have been obsolete since radar came to be. GPS is hardly the starting point for this.
As a boater I can tell you that neither radar nor GPS makes lighthouses obsolete. Nor did LORAN before them.
Sure, if you've got it and its working you can tell where you are. Within a football field if selective-availability is on, much better if it's off.
And the big commercial ships have them and they're usually working.
And the small commercial ships in well-to-do countries (like fishing boats for instance) may have them and they may be working.
And the more well-to-do pleasure-boaters may have them and they may be working.
But there are a LOT of boats out there that DON'T have them. The BULK of them, if you're talking numbers.
Fishermen may not have them - and may have other things to deal with than watching a screen. Most pleasure boats are small fry, not millionaires' giant toys. (A small ocean-capable cruising sailboat, for instance, may be considerably less expensive than an RV of a similar size.)
Even if they have them, any bets whether they're working when you're coming in after a month at sea, two years after they were purchased? Salt spray is HELL on electronics, and gets into everything.
And even when they do have them, and they are operating, a boater may think he's far out to sea when he's actually almost onto a hidden hazard, and not be looking. (A lighted nav marker, among other things, is the idiot-light of boating.)
Saying GPS obsoletes lighthouses is like saying GPS-based navigation systems for cars obsolete stop signs, curve signs, and the blinking lights associated with them.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... or more relevant... pseudolites. These are pseudo GPS satellites that can be used to add more "satellites" to the GPS solution.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The prudent mariner will not rely solely on any single aid to navigation.
Natianiel Bowditch (as best as I can recall the quote)
Among many other reasons for retaining fixed aids to navigation, the GPS system uses the WGS-84 datum. Many charts, in particular many harbor charts, still use local datam references.
Check with the former Commanding Officer and Navigator of the USS LaMoure County for their opinion regarding over-reliance on GPS positions with respect to local chart datums.
Visual and radar piloting have the benefit of being independent of the local coordinate system. Visual aids to navigation, in particular, may seem to be "obsolete" but they are wonderfully helpful in real world piloting situations.
Been there, done that, didn't get relieved for cause.
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You lose big Karma points for posting a Snopes story as truth.
Snopes... if it sounds too good or too funny to be true, you should probably check Snopes. Otherwise, those of us who have will mercilessly mock you.
you kill a lighthouse!
Please, think of the historical beacons of safety.
Everyone here seems to get it wrong. We went through the same thing over the last few years on the west coast of Canada over closing up lighthouses, replacing them with automatic beacons. A lot of them are starting to be opened again and staffed by humans. Why?
Everyone thinks a lighthouse just sits there and looks bright in the darkness. The ones on the west coast here:
- radio in weather reports from their stations
- test the water for pollution and temperature
- test salinity of the water at high and low tides
- send in visibility reports
- assist passing boaters with information via radio.
- assist boaters who know where they are already (thanks to those GPSs) but also know they're in trouble.
Last week I saw a thing on TV on the daily schedule of a lighthouse up in northwest BC. Did you know the lighthouse keepers' day starts at 3AM with the first readings and goes until 10 PM? Which is usually why it's either a family or at least 2 people staffing them.
GPS units can help you avoid troubles just fine, but if you're already in a situation, it can't do more than tell you where you are. A lighthouse can coordinate assistance efforts on your behalf, and if you're close enough, may be able to either guide you in, or come get you in their launch.
Surveyors can let a GPS "integrate" and use other techniques that don't work on a moving boat.
Also in many parts of the world knowing your exact possition to within meters is not as good as it sound because the charts are not so good. For example if the big rock is charted 1/2 mile ast of where it really is. This is common. Radars and lighthouses will still be needed for a long time.
Every book and navigation class will tell you to NEVER depend on only one source of navigation data. Always use at least two and cross check.
I typically use simple techniques from the pre-electronic era to comfirm the GPS. I've punch ed in a wrong number on the GPS and would have gone off in a totally wrong direction
I gave a lot of thought to this while I was in Cape Cod last Fall...
:)
They paid a few million dollars to relocate highland lighthouse hundreds of feet because of beach erosion in 1997. Admittedly anyone who sails around highland (Cape Cod) lighthouse is well aware of that spot and GPS does a far better job than that lighthouse... But the historical significance outweighed the price.
GPS is more accurate and any vessel that uses it for navigation darn well better have a fail-safe. I don't think reliability is going to be too big a concern...
Light houses will likely stay in operation purely for the atmosphere in the future. The new bulbs are extremely high efficiency and cost of operation is minimal, it's relocating the darn things because of beach erosion that might do them in... At that point it probably becomes a publicly funded situation, with local residents pitching to save their historic landmarks rather than tax dollars.
I for one would pay to keep them in operation, you really have to experience a night in Cape Cod to understand
Not if the location of the lighthouse is off a bit, and the location of the big-ass underwater rock was mapped relative to the lighthouse. :-)
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