navigation

GPS spoofing sends a yacht off course

In the news this week, we have a case of life imitating Hollywood.

In Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond's nemesis-of-the-week spoofed a GPS signal to send a British warship into Chinese waters, while its captain and crew thought it was still on the right side of the border. Now, a University of Texas team has (with the skipper's permission) done exactly the same thing to a superyacht cruising the Med.

Lubber's Loops

Boats, unlike cars, rarely go where you point them. This is, of course, old news to anyone who voyages under sail; likewise for those who navigate in coastal areas with strong currents. Those of us with small, fast powerboats tend not to care about this quirk once we leave the dock- how much of an effect can a light breeze have on a 20-plus-knot boat?

Quite a bit, in fact. The "lubber's loop", the course that's sailed when cross-track error is ignored, gets all of us in a bit of trouble now and then.

Situational awareness and electronics overload

It's hard not to be impressed by the latest round of navigation electronics. This is 2010, after all, an era in which the average desktop computer has the computing power to calculate the airflow around a Space Shuttle during re-entry, and we can't tell the difference between live and CGI actors on the cinema screen. I'm not convinced, though, that all this computing power is a good thing to be throwing at navigation systems- at least, not in the ways we see in some of the current crop of nav systems.

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