Re: Basic navigational skills badly missing

Bootlaces wrote:

>> I heard that they called for help via a mobile phone, but there
>> location was being traced by triangulating from the phone masts.
>>
>> Why on earth didn't they have a GPS?

Good point Gordon.

Now this is really stupid. They'd happily slag them off if they didn't take
a compass, but no GPS? No problem. The current tendency to slag off GPS in
favour of traditional navigation probably leads to a lot of people not
bothering with GPS. Yet a GPS would have given them their exact position
and possibly enabled to avoid the whole incident in the first place.

Traditional navigation is all very well if you can do it, but clearly some
people aren't that skilled at it, especially in a whiteout. Yet even
unskilled navigators would be able to ascertain their exact position with a
GPS. Of course, I'm not suggesting taking *only* a GPS.

Okay, I know there's the possibility of them not knowing how to use the GPS
either, typically by leaving it set to WGS84 instead of Ordnance Survey, but
even in that instance, they'd still have known their position accurate to
half a mile, which would have been a lot better than a few miles. The MRT
could even have asked them to check the datum and tell them to set it
correctly if it was wrong.

> Because they chose not to?

This may be a valid point if they were skilled navigators, but they weren't.
And given the area they were walking in, and the expected conditions,
wouldn't it make sense to take every navigation aid available? They could
have left it switched off at the bottom of a rucksack if they chose to, but
it would have become extremely useful when their compass work failed them.

> I think the correct question should be "Why on earth did they have a
> mobile phone?"

Well I don't think there's any argument in this instance that carrying one
was of great benefit. In those conditions I see no good reason not to carry
a map, compass, GPS and mobile phone.

Paul


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