SatNav Peaks?

During a mild tidying effort this morning I came close to throwing out the Jan/Feb issue of Navigation News, but then spotted something that I had originally overlooked. A news item that hinted that the role of GPS in our lives may be waning:

'Investment bank Goldman Sachs has voiced the concern that 2009 could usher in several years of decline in the portable navigation device market. It made the comment while moving stocks in Garmin, one of the leading satnav manufacturers, to its 'conviction sell' list.'

I was mistaken. Unfortunately the reason it gave was not that everyone was switching to 'NatNav', but that smartphones were increasingly being fitted with navigation functions. Perhaps as this trend kicks in we can look forward to the sight of fat lorries wedged in narrow country lanes and people wedged inbetween trees too!

GPS (Global Piglet System)

The worlds of technology, navigation and nature convened in a mildly surreal way over the past month.

Satellite navigation development, like all things space-related, often appears to be governed more by national pride than calm pragmatism. Nobody has yet explained effectively to me the need for billions to be invested in Galileo, the European alternative to the American GPS system. The Russian version of GPS, GLONASS, has not been a story of relentless success or necessity either, but apparently the system has now been tested on Vladimir Putin's dog.

'Mr Ivanov said that the equipment goes on a standby mode when "the dog doesn't move, if it, say, lies down in a puddle."

Mr Putin interrupted him jokingly: "My dog isn't a piglet, it doesn't lie in puddles.'

Bovine Headlines

Navigation may fill my working hours, but even I couldn't pretend that it is a high profile topic. Last week however a story about cows pointing north and south started appearing everywhere, there is a good summary on the BBC website.
On Saturday the Times newspaper ran a main news story and editorial piece describing how GPS navigators are not getting the full experience and are being denied the benefit of the rich detail of traditional maps. They put it well, 'Turn left on to the A303 for Andover, ignoring the ancient stones: those without a map may not know they are passing Stonehenge.'
Perhaps this mini-surge of interest is why they were kind enough to run a snippet about my courses too.

Navigation Courses

A blog is not a blog without an occasional rant, so...

It strikes me that the world of navigation training has strayed a little off course. If you type "navigation courses" into Google you get nearly five and a half million results. I'd be prepared to wager that more than five million of these are associated with 'traditional' training. To my mind the majority of these are falling between two stools. They focus on using tools but not the best ones. The two ends of the spectrum are electronics and nature. Nobody, myself included, argues that natural methods are more accurate than electronics when it is working. Equally, nobody in their right mind would want to challenge someone holding a working GPS to a position-fixing competion using compass back-bearings. Where am I going with this?

Well, why do we concentrate the vast majority of our training and learning in the area that is now neither the most accurate nor the most resilient? Electronic navigation is the most accurate when it works and natural navigation cannot break. I am not suggesting that we don't continue to learn how to use compasses and other tools that are less accurate and not immune to failure, I am just questioning whether we should have so many eggs in those baskets at the expense of natural awareness. Would we not be better off spending a small fraction of that time studying the world around us without any tools at all?