mayday: taking on water at celebrations.fried.blackouts

[guyerb]

Has anyone been watching what3words.com? They have mapped out every 3mx3m square of the planet with three words. Check out where ///celebrations.fried.blackouts is for fun.

It is multilingual
https://support.what3words.com/hc/en...-available-in-

Maybe this becomes the primary identifier of location and lat/long the backup?
-guy

[StuM]

Apparently it's been around for about 5 years, but I hadn't heard of it before.


Sounds a bit like the Open Location Codes aka Plus Codes that Google came up with a few years ago. That one doesn't seem to have taken off either. (Not to mention ham Maidenhead codes and several other attempts to replace Lat/Long )


Since What3Words is proprietary, I don't hold out a great future for it.



The big problem with it is that you can't tell how far apart locations are:

I'm sitting in a marina berth. Apparently my cockpit is currently at ///freed.immunity.twinge and my saloon is at ///behaving.supposed.rooting. Meanwhile my foredeck is at ///swelling.corner.sour.

[sailormed]

If I have to navigate to a point and I get coordinates in what3words I do not see how to get that point in my MFD so I can navigate, get bearings etc.

[tkeithlu]

The USA uses, and emergency management insists on, a national grid system under which 18SUJ2331507363 is a one meter square in the middle of the Oval Office. It's maddening, because two sets of locations tells you zero about the relationship between them, and no rectangular system translates onto a spheroid. The Germans had such a system for locating U-boats during WWII, but then, they were actively trying to confuse everyone.

[a64pilot]

Originally Posted by tkeithlu

The USA uses, and emergency management insists on, a national grid system under which 18SUJ2331507363 is a one meter square in the middle of the Oval Office. It's maddening, because two sets of locations tells you zero about the relationship between them, and no rectangular system translates onto a spheroid. The Germans had such a system for locating U-boats during WWII, but then, they were actively trying to confuse everyone.

Those coordinates sure bear a very close resemblance to the MGRS or military grid reference system, and if that is what it is, and I suspect it is, it is actually probably the absolute best system there is as far as navigating and knowing exactly where you are and exactly where something else is in relation to where you are.
Four digits gets you to 1000 meters, 6 to 100 meters, and 8 to 10 meters and ten digits to 1 meter.

Two things should be noticed, first it’s metric and therefore world wide mapping, and second it’s digital.

If I wanted to put a JDAM in your front door, MGRS is used, because nothing else is easier or more precise. Or Artillery for instance, you have to have a system that you can teach to any Private that they won’t likely mess up and call arty on themselves or friendly forces

Now for some kind of political reason some other system may be desired to be used, but MGRS is far superior to the Lat / Long.

I’d suspect the Emergency Management agency would use the MGRS also because of their heavy reliance on the Military, and that’s the military system.
Give any military system an MGRS grid and its typed into their and system and they can navigate straight to it, give them anything else and something is going to have to convert that to an MGRS grid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mili...ference_System

[tkeithlu]

It is MGRS, and my GPS does report it. The problems arise when you go from one letter combination to another. Within one, I agree, it is easy to plot direction and distance with appropriate plotting paper. But, my county (where I am the volunteer Operations Chief) has a junction of three letter zones, necessary because grid squares do not translate onto a spheroid. Add to that that those irregular junctures result in a single site having two possible references.

Yes, it's great for aiming artillery, and it defines a one meter square rather than a point to a certain degree of precision. I don't aim artillery. I read nautical charts and draw small maps.

If you give me two sets of lat/lon, I can in my head visualize the relative positions and approximate the distance and bearing between them. Neither of us can do that with
18SUJ2331507363, 17RKP5246205122.

[requiem]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

I’d suspect the Emergency Management agency would use the MGRS also because of their heavy reliance on the Military, and that’s the military system.
Give any military system an MGRS grid and its typed into their and system and they can navigate straight to it, give them anything else and something is going to have to convert that to an MGRS grid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mili...ference_System

Indeed. Technically it's the US National Grid, but it's equivalent to MGRS using the WGS84 datum. The nice part is that USGS topo maps are already semi-compatible with it if they have a UTM grid (and are using the same datum, of course).

It also has the benefit of being easy to learn, use, and abbreviate, and you don't risk people mistaking decimal degrees for decimal minutes. If I'm on a hike in the mountains, I can read e.g. "536 812" off my phone and know almost instantly where I am in relation to where I want to be.

Of course, the trouble spots are at the corners where the 100km squares meet. That's why it's only the land standard, and for air or sea work degrees and decimal minutes is primary.

[tkeithlu]

I'm seeing its utility to you. You are not crossing lettered squares. Within a square, and using three digits for north and three for west, it's very easy. It's a single subtraction for each dimension. Crossing squares, which sometimes are not square, I've described as a problem. The other would be long number sequences, particularly before you separate them into equal length N and W. That's a problem similar to using decimal degrees with a long string. Using decimal minutes, on the other hand, is easier than decimal degrees, because in minutes it's nautical miles N-S, and at my latitude, 0.8 nautical miles for E-W. You're navigating to a 100 meter square when hiking, which is plenty of precision.

Whatever floats your boat.

[SeanPatrick]

Link to a discussion on this over at NavList a while back:


NavList Message Index: January, 2014 to December, 2019

[myocean]

Nor really practical.
1st: Vicinity of places can not be made obvious.
2st: Wordsare easy to communicate in your mother tongue. But if you try to use this with a Hungarian factory worker, or a Japanese kid - not so practical...

[Ghostrider421]

Just a stupid thought. How would any of this work if you had no electronics?

[SeanPatrick]

Seems a local brewery is using this. It's the only time I've ever seen it "in the wild".