Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Remembering 06/06/1944

As the date approaches and all the local and International events are gathering pace I am reminded to drag this out from my files from back in the day when I joined the then Decca Navigator Co back in 1969.
A great firm to work for too for most of my career with just the best colleagues and bosses imaginable 32 years of free global travel and fun, I was truly blessed and thank the boys on this date for giving so much freedom for us all to enjoy 80 years ago

Richard, when I started in Aviation early seventies. Several of the Carvairs (ATL98) a converted DC4 had Decca navigators fitted. Great bit of kit although a bit large. Much better than Consul or Loran in my opinion.

Yet all we get now is some unfounded fuzzy bleating about the re-introduction of conscription, which actually might be just 12 days of community service. Hang on I need to check with the Pravda Officer.

I have often seen those diagrams of the evolution of mankind, with due respect to those who are religious and believe it just sort of happened, so we'll go with aliens in that case. Going forwards we will have tiny bodies with extended digits for pushing buttons and swiping screens. I think they totally miss the obvious. There will be the IT driven morph but there will also be a second one with no spine that got developed through the refinement of politics. This squid like object will be able to change at random, shape, size, colour, smell, opinion, position, belief and anything you think might bring one more vote. It will however be totally dependant on anything and everything around it to sustain it's life.

Making a difference can result in pride and dedication, but you can't blog that, it's not clickable.

Sorry cynical mode on at the moment.

No you are spot on as always, swathing your way through the myriad of bullshit that abounds these days, and it all seems in turbo/supercharged mode at the moment.

Purge away at will

IcePack, thanks for that insight good to hear.
I didn't know the Carvair so thanks for that too.

When I was still working for DN we had a routine maintenance run over to St Marys on the BA SR61N out of PZ and they always used the plotter, you could see it in the cockpit as they never drew the curtain across.

It was a sad day when I went over there to de commission the station as it was a favorite of mine.

Richard; that is indeed a valued memento and goes to show how many pieces there were in the tapestry of Operation Overlord to make it successful.

I had the system on my first sailing yacht a 1991 Moody 35. That and radar got us around Portland Bill approaching midnight in very thick summer fog and a foul tide. The loom of lighthouse and sound of foghorn left the impression we could almost have touched it.

Good to read Richard.

All the Lifeboats and SAR Helicopters were fitted with it too so as to coordinate rescues more effectively, this helped us to maintain our 99.99 % transmission record 24/7 365 or 366 as we always felt under pressure..

The company also produced an annual in house colour magazine of newly launched products and tales of successful rescues utilising our system. it was called Navigator News..

Fascinating to read the history of the system, when I started sailing offshore we were shown the first Walker satnavs which the navigators eyed very suspiciously , I do remember using an RDF handheld though. Then in 99 sailing up to the Pacific all three of us on board had our own GPS units -and plotted our way on Admiralty charts comparing the results, such a huge change in a few short years.

My career was in Marine Seismic Exploration, used to use the Racal Pulse 8 station nav chain off Malasia for long range navigation, ARGO ( Automatic Ranging Grid Overlay ) was used in the Arctic, the medium range radio nav was Hyfix and Hyfix-6 and Maxiran.. I can well remember the joys of checking calibration by cutting baselines and undertaking calibration 3 way fix's.. Then along came GPS, our parent company was Texas Instruments who was one of the US electronic contractors asked by the US Gov to develop the system.. the first reciever onboard we used was about 2ft by 2ft in size with a large calculator size hand set to interface to it.. Because we were involved in surveys all over the globe and many miles from land we were ideal test guinea pigs for GPS.. The early initial system used 3 SV's ( space vehicles ) and what was known at the time as an atomic clock ( now known as a cesium standard ) onboard, ohh the joy when we could lock onto 3 sats for an hour and navigate using GPS before going back onto long range radio nav. The only hiccup was that the military used to muck around with the positions of the SV's, so I had a direct tel number to white sands missile base to call via our Marisat system to check that they were not fine tuning and changing the SV orbits..
GPS nav then changed everything offshore and made life a lot easier to navigate, until they changed the quality of the position fix in the Gulf war, to obtain our degree of navigation precision, we then used a system called differential GPS, which was a mix of GPS positioning integrated with radio navigation from known positions of land based radio stations.. Those were the days..