Because its 2019 and all that... I learnt stellar navigation

[Hook]

Yeah, but it's HF. HF radio sucks. The plus is, it'll skip through the ionosphere and permit beyond-line-of-sight range, but the minus is, the signal clarity varies drastically based on solar and atmospheric conditions.

I used to listen to shortwave. It only sucks a little. I never was able to pick up Tahiti.

I can only watch the videos between midnight and 5 AM when my satellite Internet bandwidth isn't metered. You can go through 25 gig in a hurry watching videos, especially if they need to be at least 720.

Looking forward to the rest of the trip, and I'll check out your other videos as well.

Hook

[Stearmandriver]

So I got tired of only thinking I knew how this stuff works and decided I ought to try it for real . Celestaire had a sale on the Davis Mark 3 plastic sextant; for 35 bucks I thought "what the hell?"

It's been a lot of fun studying the details of the theory, and then all the minutiae of the sight reduction process. (I'll be honest, I only did a few by hand and table, and am using an online calculator now to speed up the process so I can plot my practice shots. There's nothing harder than addition or subtraction to using the tables, it's just tedious.)

I found it fascinating that, using an assumed position and the intercept method, I'm plotting LOPs in Google Earth exactly the same as I have for my simulated flights. It feels very familiar! The sightlines of my backyard (and the need to use a bowl of water as an artificial horizon which limits the max altitude of a shot) means I've had limited targets to practice on; mostly the sun, Vega and Spica. Looking forward to the moon's return too.

But with a cheap plastic sextant, a couple stars reflected in a bowl of water, and some math, I'm consistently fixing my position within 4 miles of home. I'll take it!

[Chairman]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but the coincidence is too good ... I just finished watching that video on youtube - yes, the whole thing - and now I'm looking for the sextant (which I had but never got into with fsx) and googling about whether it will work in P3D - and this thread was the first result google gave me

I think I'm on the right track

I live in New Zealand so there's not much danger of running out of radio signals or even being able to see a coastline when I'm at home, but I'm really getting into the older planes now and I want to stretch the wings of the Connie and the DC6, so navigation becomes a thing ...

[TreeTops]

Well done mate. Welcome to the facinating world of navigation by the stars.