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LORAN Still Worth The Trouble?
I'm planning a cruise to the same area (southern Newfoundland) so I
appreciate the intelligence. I would use the private charts you trust to enter the general shoreline as a route you can call up on one of the chartplotter units. A good winter project. It will give you a visible constant offset from the charted line that you can apply to courses and navigational dangers. In some areas you might want to simply enter a line to remain offshore from. The route names could be used to indicate which method applies. If you are a Garmin Bluecharts user, you could save this work in a gdb file to share with others (like me It doesn't sound like you are using Bluecharts but, if so or something else that can load gdb or gpx files, contact me privately. I have the means to load and scan charts into AutoCad so that lines can be traced and their properties printed out in text files which would give you lat long points to enter. Gpx files are in ASCII format so, given some time, I could write a program to process the text output from AutoCad into gpx files that could be read directly by a number of GPS plotting programs. I used to do a lot of this text file string manipulation. There may be simpler and more direct approaches but this is just what occurs to me off the top of my head. I might have plenty of time this winter to work on something like this and it would be well worth my while as a way to become more familiar with the area and the charts. BTW if I had a functioning Loran on my boat, I would keep it as a back up considering the things that could shutdown GPS although I wouldn't go out and buy one for that purpose. I also used Loran in my airplane because it worked well enough that I couldn't justify the cost of a GPS. Aircraft navigation, VFR at least, is a lot less precise than marine navigation however. When you get within 3 about miles, you switch to eyeballs. -- Roger Long |
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