From Pine View Farm

Why I Haven’t Invested in a GPS 2

From El Reg:

Two ambulance drivers’ unswerving obedience to their satnav system ended up turning a 30 minute hospital transfer into an eight hour, 430 mile wild goose chase.

The crew were supposed to be moving a male mental patient from King George hospital in Ilford to Mascalls Park hospital near Brentwood, a 12 mile journey, but a faulty satnav system directed the London Ambulance crew 200 miles off course – and they ended up in Warley, Manchester.

Sometimes, you just can’t beat a book.

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2 comments

  1. Phillybits

    December 5, 2006 at 7:18 pm

    My thoughts on GPS:

    My father has a small handheld Garmin. It’s great for marking fishing locations where we’ve had great luck in the past. It’s a few years old now and came pre-loaded with a map and we’ve never updated it so sometimes, when taking an exit off of a major highway onto a secondary road, we appear to be driving through an area with no roads.

    On the other hand, using it to navigate to Philly, it’s dead on. Not only that, but it reads elevation fantastic as well as speed, usually being only a couple tenths of a MPH off from the speedometer in the car.

    They come in handy when you’re out hiking and are marking your way via waypoints.

    On the other hand, anything mechanical is inherently due to failure, given that anything made my man is, again, due to failure.

    That said, I really want a PDA/Smartphone with GPS capabilities so that I can view satellite imagery over a broadband connection as well as use it to mark waypoints while backpacking so that I can later upload the coordinates into Google Earth and create a placemark.

     
  2. Frank

    December 6, 2006 at 4:45 pm

    If I were taking my boat out into the Atlantic (19’6″ not a chance), I would want a GPS.

    Otherwise, give me a map. I’m too old to learn new tricks.

    No. Let me rephrase that.

    I’m too old to learn new tricks unless they make my network faster.