Basic navigational skills badly missing

Peter Clinch said:

There's more stuff in a GPS to go wrong.

Yurr, if the sky falls in or sumfink, total sky failure would be a
really bad day.

....sorry, just an abstract observation is all, not a comment about
anything in particular.

Peter Clinch <[email hidden]> wrote

Quoted message said:

Gordon said:

The only one which failed was one I dropped on a chunk of Derbyshire
gritstone and the display failed, but it continued to record a
down-loadable track! I call that unreasonable use. :-)

But my point is, if you'd dropped your watch on the same bit of
gritstone would it still have told you the time there and then? Rather
more likely, I think.

OK, I've tested the GPS dropping incident, you test your watch, and let
us know. ;-)
--
Gordon Harris

Gordon said:

OK, I've tested the GPS dropping incident, you test your watch, and let
us know. ;-)

I don't drop it much, it's attached to my wrist. Which is another
factor in Not Breaking It, of course...

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net [email hidden] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

Peter Clinch <[email hidden]> wrote

Quoted message said:

Gordon said:

OK, I've tested the GPS dropping incident, you test your watch, and
let us know. ;-)

I don't drop it much, it's attached to my wrist. Which is another
factor in Not Breaking It, of course...

I just glanced at my watch and see that the glass is covered in
scratches, I always forget to take it off when skate-boarding. ;-)
--
Gordon Harris

Peter Clinch said:

I don't drop it much, it's attached to my wrist. Which is another
factor in Not Breaking It, of course...

A friend of mine slipped on some mud once and smashed his wristwatch against
a rock.

Paul

Peter Clinch said:

Chris Malcolm wrote:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

On general principles, speaking as someone who usually tries to fix
(and sometimes succeeds) every electroinc device which fails,
including watches, mobile phones, calculators, GPSs, and takes an
educated interested in their technology, I'd expect the same level of
reliability out of a hiking-hardened GPS as a watch.

Quoted message said:

There's more stuff in a GPS to go wrong. There's a reliance on external
signals with requirement for capturing those signals, there's more
information to display on a bigger screen, more and more elaborate
software, greater need for holes in the case, and it's bigger and in the
way of knocks more. There's a lot more of it doing a lot more things.

True, but most of the extra stuff is modern digital electronics inside
chips, the reliability of which is so good that the reliability of the
entire package depends almost entirely on the residual mechatronics of
the device, the battery, its holder, the case, the buttons, and so on.

I do agree that the reliability of my hiking-hardened GPSs (eTrexen)
is probably less than my watches, but not much, e.g., where I can
expect a watch to go for about ten years without a problem, I'll maybe
get only five years from a hiking-hardened GPS.

--
Chris Malcolm [email hidden] +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]