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Roger Halstead wrote:
> HOWEVER...The government is having second thoughts as to using GPS as the > SOLE means of navigation. I did a flight plane last week for Jefco. At my > cruise altitude GPS would have been useless with the testing going on out > there and at 10,000 feet the erro existed over several hundred miles. > Fine, WHAT ERROR ? How far off ? I did it create a situtation where the GPS thought it was on the wrong side of the world ? If the net error was LESS than the HUGE error (by comparision) of a standard VOR at long range from the station, then this is a NON-ISSUE. I get a little tired of people bashing GPS. Is GPS a single point of failure ? NO. There are many redundant satellites, and they transmit spread spectrum over a wide frequency band. The only "single point of failure" is if you only have one GPS unit. I have THREE, in addition to 2 VORs as backup. The fact is that GPS is currently an enroute solution, with ILS or VOR the most popular approaches, since minimums usually are less attractive on the GPS approaches. And for enroute work, GPS is far more accurate and reliable than VOR. If we had everyone screaming "look at that !" every time the VOR gave a wrong reading, it would need its own newsgroup ! |
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