As a keen yachtsman I am interested in comments made about direction finding
beacons. To the best of my knowledge there are no operational beacons for
shipping use in UK or adjacent waters. In fact it is a long time since I
have seen a DF loop on a boat although some boats retain the receivers
mainly to listen to shipping forecasts on 198khz.
GPS has taken over as the primary radio position fixing method. Till
recently the GPS satellite signal available for non military use was
degraded so that the fix would be plus or minus 100m. To overcome this
differential GPS was developed, sighting a GPS receiver at a known location
and broadcasting the error. A receiver then feeds this error signal to the
GPS on the boat which gives a correction to plus or minus 10m. Recently the
error has been removed from the GPS signal which will makes this system
redundant. I have copied the UK beacons out of Macmillan's Almanac
uk differential beacons
Khz
293.5 St Catherines Point
284.0 Lizard
299.0 Nash point
305.0 Point Lynas
294.0 Butt of Lewis
304.0 Sumburgh
311.0 Gridle Ness
302.5 Flambourgh Head
310.5 North Foreland
If anyone is really excited about this I will copy out the page and post it
somewhere!
Martin M5CIX
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