A New Buoy

For those not yet aware a new buoy came into operation recently. The Emergency Wreck Marker is blue and yellow vertical stripes with an upright yellow cross as a topmark and flashing alternate blue and yellow light. Details can be found on the Trinity House website at www.trinityhouse.co.uk/aids_to_navigation/the_task/wrecks.html.

GPS Black Holes

The RYA Magazine has an excellent article on the frailties of GPS. Anyone studying for an RYA qualification would do well to read it. To quote a small section of the article:

"A realatively low powered jammer,only thousandths of a watt of power, transmitting static on the GPS frequency band can overpower legitimate GPS signals over a wide area."

It just goes to show how week the signals from satallites are and how easily they can be interfered with either deliberately or accidentally. That is why we, as instructors, continue to advocate the use of paper charts as a back up to chart plotters and GPS, and that each time a position is taken from a GPS it should be backed up with additional data. In this way problems can be spotted at an early stage. So please carry on using the technology, but be aware of the limitations.