The year 1981 marks the fourth centenary of the birth of Edmund Gunter who, during his relatively short life, played a dominant role in England in the advancement of navigation. Born in Hertfordshire, of Welsh parentage, Gunter was educated at Westminster School before entering Christchurch College, Oxford, where he graduated BA in 1603; MA in 1606; and BD in 1615, in which year he was presented to the living at St George's, Southwark.

As early as 1603 Gunter had written an account of a ‘New Projection of the Sphere’ which was circulated in manuscript among some of his mathematical acquaintances. This appears to have gained for him the friendship of Henry Briggs, the first Gresham Professor of Geometry and a brilliant mathematician best known for having been first to suggest a table of logarithms to base 10 – ‘common logarithms’, as they are now known.

What constitutes a minimum safe distance of approach in an overtaking or meeting situation is a problem that has engaged the interest of seamen since steam began to supplant sail. Prior to that time vessels were often obliged to steer zig-zag courses in tacking against the wind, and though they were probably no less concerned with avoiding a collision the problem was of a different order.

Numerous collisions over the years have emphasized the need for rapid and efficient ship-to-ship voice communication systems. Such systems, set up to satisfy the demand for more and better channels through which messages can be sent, should guarantee that both sender and receiver come to share the same thoughts and feelings. ‘It can be said that two expressions have the same meaning if their utterance results in the same change of behaviour.’ Recognizing that voice communication systems cannot be effective until all parties speak and understand the same ‘language’, the Maritime Safety Committee of IMCO has developed the Standard Marine Navigational Vocabulary, a significant landmark in the attempt to achieve the maximum safety to navigation and the most appropriate conduct of ships at sea. This paper will concentrate on the objectives of the Vocabulary and will try to ascertain if such objectives have been achieved. The analysis will emphasize the viewpoint of ‘non-English speaking people’ using English ‘for the interchange of intelligence between individuals of all maritime nations’, and will take linguistic considerations into account.

This paper by the Principal Scientific Officer of Trinity House was presented at an Institute meeting in London on 28 April 1976 with Mrs. Mary Pera in the Chair.

Mr. Reynolds describes the use of lights to convey positional and other information by the assignment of characteristics of rhythm and colour and discusses the problems of visual discrimination, the choice of light intensities and the effect of atmospheric conditions on the ranges of lights. He also describes the new buoyage system and other moves towards international agreement. A paper on the IALA system by the Hydro-grapher of the Navy appears at p. 94.

Lighting is used in various ways in maritime applications. For operations at night in vessels, in harbours or on drilling platforms general lighting is necessary; such lights may also be of value in indicating a hazard or suggesting a route to be followed but are not expressly intended for that purpose. Fixed lights in vessels are arranged in a spatial pattern and employ colour to give indications of the presence and aspect of the vessel to other vessels. Indirect lighting is also sometimes used, as in the floodlighting of lighthouse towers to reduce bird deaths by collision.

There have been two distinct phases in the development of radio aids to navigation. The first, which must be regarded as the true pioneer period, followed rapidly upon the development of wireless telegraphy by Marconi and others; it was soon realized that the early aerials employed had directional properties and that this phenomenon could be used to obtain a bearing.

A large interest in developing commercial Location-Based Services (LBS) and the necessity of implementing emergency call services, have led to the intensive development of techniques for mobile users' localisation. In this paper, a Public Land Mobile Networks (PLMN) -based technique for initial position determination is proposed as an alternative to satellite-based methods in environments with obstructed satellite signals. Two positioning models, based on handset available Received Signal Strength (RSS) measurements from Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) base stations and the use of Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms, are proposed. Performances of proposed models are verified using field measurements, collected in a suburban environment. Models are analysed in terms of positioning accuracy, complexity and latency, and compared to some other promising PLMN-based techniques. Using proposed SVM-based positioning models a median error of 4·3 m–6·2 m and latency of less than a second can be achieved.

Reasonable stochastic model and function model are the premise of accurate velocity determination, especially in the time-differenced carrier-phase (TDCP) method. This paper presents, first, an elevation-dependent stochastic model (ESM), and then gives a simplified and unified Galileo/GPS combined TDCP function model, where the inter-system bias (ISB) variations are analysed based on correlation coefficients and the scaled sensitivity matrix. To evaluate the performance of the proposed models, datasets collected at 10 multi-GNSS experiment (MGEX) stations and a vehicle kinematic experiment are employed. The results indicate that the ESM model can improve the accuracy of the velocity solution, especially for the Galileo/GPS combined system, in comparison with the equivalent weight ratio method. In contrast to the Galileo-only velocity solution, the Galileo/GPS combined velocity solution can bring improvements of about 1–1⋅5 mm/s, 0⋅5 mm/s and 1⋅5–2⋅5 mm/s in East, North and Up components, respectively. Compared with the traditional Galileo/GPS TDCP model, the simplified and unified model shows no obvious differences in all components in the environment with more visible satellites, but it performs better in a challenging environment with few visible satellites.

A version of this paper was first presented at the European Navigation Conference 2006, held under the auspices of the RIN at Manchester on 8–10 May 2006.

This paper reviews the need for the GLAs to develop a strategy for the integration of radionavigation services around the British Isles. After investigating the recent trends and forecasts for shipping and with a view towards the need for e-Navigation, the strategy formation process and initial findings for the development of a radionavigation plan are outlined.

Exact tidal study extends back to a fourteenth century record containing sexagesimal times. Earlier commentators have taken these times to be high water. This study shows they are for the later moment of when the flood ends; and, that eighteenth and nineteenth century elevation measurements formed a completely different way of considering the tide, leading directly to reliable predictions. The result shows the Thames tide to have been more consistent than previously stated; and consequently the actual change more accelerated. Therefore tidal current predictions are shown to have a longer history than have water surface elevation levels.

The benefits of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and in particular GPS have been demonstrated worldwide, and continue to accrue in the form of new applications. Today, some mission critical applications (largely driven by safety) mostly in aviation and to a lesser extent maritime, rely on a number of techniques for the provision of integrity monitoring services. However, for many applications such as those associated with the emergency services, road user charging and personal navigation devices, no such monitoring exists and service validation is limited due to technical and cost constraints. The problem is exacerbated by a recent increase in more challenging problems, particularly in the security industry, in which jamming devices have been used to disrupt the use of GPS. This paper presents a new approach for a cost effective local solution to the problems above, at the individual user level, by providing the user with information on Quality of Service (QoS). The approach is based on the deployment of a single or network of probes supported by an existing regional network. The probes communicate with a central server and are designed to detect localised events whilst the regional network isolates space segment anomalies. The latter is addressed in detail in this paper in terms of design methodology and performance, using the Ordnance Survey's UK GNSS network.

Bridge design has undergone changes in the last few decades resulting in increased awareness of the need for safety while maintaining the minimum of personnel. The concept of the one-person bridge has been studied fairly extensively with respect to military and large merchant vessels, but much of this work has been ignored by those designing for smaller ships, particularly fishing vessels. This paper derives principles for positioning the electronic fishing aids of ‘single ticket’ fishing vessels while applying, where applicable practically, the ergonomic principles developed from the wider community. The paper then applies the principles to the wheelhouses of two fishing vessels and suggests modifications for greater compliance. A conceptual wheelhouse design is given that satisfies all the principles while including the usual suite of electronic aids typically carried by such fishing vessels.

The GNSS-R technique brings out the need for signal receiver systems to process both direct and reflected GNSS signals. This paper describes the architecture of a new GNSS-R receiver system (GRrSv.2) that features enhanced capabilities for remote sensing based on reflected Global Positioning System (GPS) signals. Signal processing issues including DDM calculation, Carrier and Code Generation and DDM Synchronization are presented. Aircraft- and land-based verification experiments for ocean winds, ocean Significant Wave Heights (SWH) and soil moisture have been performed and some primary results are presented in this paper.

The paper describes an experimental analogue computer used with a civil marine radar set for determining the closest point of approach of selected ship's echoes and the time to closest approach. The equipment was installed on shore and measurements made of shipping passing to and from Portsmouth and Southampton harbours. The projected track of a ship echo was displayed on a 5-in. diameter cathode ray tube and the closest point of approach read as the distance of this track from the centre of the tube. The results show a high probability that under these conditions errors in C.P.A. will not exceed ±0·5 n.m. for targets between 10 and 6 n.m. range, and ±0·3 n.m. for targets nearer than 6 n.m.

The two papers which follow, by the late Captain (and Dr) Charles Cotter, are the last of a number of papers he submitted for publication in the Journal, and which have appeared from time to time. Now that he is no longer with us it seems appropriate that they should be published simultaneously.

This paper, with Dr Lyon's was presented in Paris in November 1983 at an international colloquium organized by the Centre d'Etudes Arctiques of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, by whose kind permission they are here reproduced. The theme of the conference, at which some 35 papers were presented, was the Conquest of the North Pole; the subjects covered included both the history of Arctic exploration and contemporary problems and the future of polar transport, sea and air. Mr Kerr is Director of the Canadian Hydrographic Service's Atlantic Region; both he and his co-author are at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth.

In order to navigate and thereby survive in a hostile environment the Inuit have developed a sophisticated body of knowledge that makes travel possible even during a blizzard or white-out. This unique skill was developed from a thorough understanding of the properties of snow and local meteorology. Problems of space, time and distance are also taken into account by Inuit navigators but this is done with minimal use of quantification and abstraction. However this highly practical form of navigation in which the Inuit deal directly with their environment is none the less scientific and empirical.

In 1971 the author attempted a single-handed sailing of the North West Passage and in 1973 completed a crossing of Arctic North America by dog team.

We describe a new type of radio navigation and tracking system which, unlike conventional systems, does not depend on a costly infrastructure of coherent radio transmitters. This new system measures positions using spatial, rather than temporal, coherence and can therefore use any existing radio transmitters set up for any purpose. We describe the principles of operation, applications and present results obtained with a demonstration unit (in Cambridge) which can measure the position of a motor vehicle to a precision of about 5 m using local medium-wave public broadcast transmitters.

In 1874, the Austrian arctic scientist, Weyprecht, on his return from an Austro-Hungarian polar expedition stated that, though many countries had sent expeditions into the polar regions at great expense and involving appreciable hazards to those participating, no important contributions to knowledge had resulted from them. They had done a certain amount of mapping and obtained a few meteorological observations but the primary object had been, as a matter of national prestige, to plant the flag nearer to the Pole than had been reached before. In his opinion what was needed for the advancement of knowledge about the polar regions was that nations should collaborate in sending expeditions to various parts of the arctic region to make observations throughout the whole of one year. Largely because of his persistent advocacy of this view, the value of the proposal came to be recognized, and as a result the enterprise known as the First International Polar Year was developed. A number of countries combined to send expeditions to establish observing stations at selected points in the arctic region to make observations throughout the year 1882–3 in meteorology and geomagnetism and also of the aurora. The observations made during this Polar Year contributed appreciably to knowledge of geomagnetism and of meteorology.

Disasters result from the breakdown of navigational faculties. Those concerned with the ‘practical’ aspects of navigation naturally assume a standard and infinitely flexible nervous system by which the individual can adjust to the stresses created by great speeds in the absence of habitual sense information. This paper outlines the nervous basis of adjustment to environment (personal navigation), the forms of breakdown in disease, and the nature of hallucinations. Some forms of disturbing experiences likely to be felt in modern navigation are predicted and explained. Such problems are seen as integral matters of aviation planning, design and practice.

‘The main aim … is to enable interested persons with quite different backgrounds of knowledge and experience, to come together and consider collectively a subject of common interest from their various standpoints.’

(A. M. A. Majendie, ‘The Significance of Blunders’, this Journal, 12, 28.)