GPS Lite?? What3words

The huge advantages of this location nomenclature system is that it is very unlikely to transpose characters, it is simple, rapidly communicated and understood, and there is no guessing the units system (DMS or decimal degrees?). As the Brits would say, "brilliant!"
 
Shannon theory put into practice. I do admire that aspect.
 
Giving it a ‘lite’ read, I agree, rather brilliant!



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Bill Watson said:
Giving it a ‘lite’ read, I agree, rather brilliant!



Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro
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Problem is, there are still places where you can get a signal to make a phone call, but can't get data to download an app. However you can still get a lat/long on your phone without data.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
I am all for anything that is practical.
Win.
awakened.outgrown.almonds
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Macmillan RV Park?

That’s where the road stops but it’s actually the homestead across the road. I see how this works. Pretty accurate and an easy way to get a very specific points on an existing map. Especially if the map is older than the building your in.

My current private hell is Fulfilled.cubist.crook (which was a bit of undeveloped woodland less than a year ago.


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Now that I'm using it I can see a problem with some of these words; it can get to a similar level of difficulty of reading a series of numbers. Copy, paste, text would be fine...but a gps latlong can be done that way too.
 
This solves a very common issue with GPS.

Different apps or devices use different Lat/Long numbering schemes. If you tell rescue services your location in DD°MM’SS.SS” but they use DD.dddd then it’s quite possible they’ll never find you if they don’t correctly convert. Plus the location relies on the precision of the number.

Also Lat/Long gets you four possible points without the correct Hemisphere notation. Some use +/- while others N/S/E/W. Yeah a rescue operator will catch the error fairly quickly when you show up on the opposite side of the Earth. But that still adds in error.
 
W3W is a really great app in some situations. For example, Oshkosh. It's much easier to tell someone where you are with the words, IMO - Many GPS apps are so geared towards car navigation that they just try to resolve the nearest street address, which ain't anywhere near where you really are.

Plus, I was really happy a few years ago when our spot in GAP was able.jealous.aviation. :D
 
It’s a good idea.

The big downside is that the “coordinates” are only useful to determine the precise location and only useful when paired with the application. Give me lat/long and I can immediately determine a rough location on the planet without any device. Give me three words and I can’t do anything at all useful with them without the application.

This is not a big issue for its intended purposes however.
 
The more effective solution would be to upgrade your emergency communications centers to receive the spatial coordinates from the cellphone carriers. If the phones have a valid position solution, they transmit it to the carriers system. If they don't have a valid GPS position, the carriers system triangulates the approximate position based on signal picked up by different towers. In correctly upgraded and configured ECCs in the US, that information is available to the call-takers. You DO need to make sure that everyone knows the formatting of the different messages and they don't start to send search teams to :
- coordinates of the tower that pinged the phone rather than the phone itself
- 2 counties over because you fatfingered minutes/seconds into minutes/decimal minutes.
(both of these have been combined in a single incident)




Now there is something uniquely british about getting lost in 'Hamsterley forest'
 
So nobody is going to mention the fact that the people 1. Had cell phone coverage to make a phone call and B. Had data coverage to download a new app, yet still couldn't figure out how to navigate out of the forest? Even looking at Google Maps will tell you "Oh.. Looks like the parking lot is this way." Smh...
 
Us aviation types understand the concept of lat/longs and can disseminate that information to people trying to find us. But if you’re a typical millennial who only knows how to swipe right, or a hick volunteer fire fighter, this app is pretty brilliant.

Or like someone said, trying to find each other at Oshkosh. It would be much easier for me to say I’m at fart.poops.cats vs 34’564W56’573N.
 
EdFred said:
Numbers are hard.
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Groundpounder said:
Us aviation types understand the concept of lat/longs
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SkyDog58 said:
Learn.Map.Reading.
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I think what everyone is missing is that this isn't solely about number skills or map skills. As I alluded to earlier about Shannon theory it's also about communication through a noisy channel. One could think of it as a really crude approximation of convolutional coding similar to the way we pilots say "Alfa Mike Zulu Tree Fife Niner" instead of "AMZ359".

Note that a noisy channel doesn't just apply to distance but time as well. For example, at one point in history magnetic hard drives got so dense that neighboring bits were interfering with each other. The solution was to employ coding methods similar to those used in digital communications (PRML or Partial Response Maximum Likelihood). Human memory is similarly fallible and one solution is to change the coding, such as we have here where 34’564W56’573N = fart.poop.cats.

And it's not just with recall but also transcription errors. As anyone who's ever tried to copy ATIS in turbulence, the path from your brain to your pen can also be a noisy channel.
 
FastEddieB said:
Downloaded.

THAT’S FREAKING AMAZING!!!

And genius!

Try ///smoker.exhaling.islander and see what you get!
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That brings up a new problem with this system. Type ///smokers.exhaling.islander by accident and you're literally on the wrong side of the planet.
 
Salty said:
That brings up a new problem with this system. Type ///smokers.exhaling.islander by accident and you're literally on the wrong side of the planet.
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Sounds like somebody made some poor choices with the dictionary*.

* "dictionary" in the digital communications sense, not the literary kind.
 
But how does it work when you have phone service but not data service?

The places where I might get lost this would be useless. I can make a call, but data is a no go.
 
EdFred said:
But how does it work when you have phone service but not data service?
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Presumably you don't need data. The app could get the coordinates from the GPS circuitry and just re-code it according to a pre-shared dictionary/algorithm. Theoretically, you don't need phone service either if you aren't trying to transmit your location over the air.
 
The app could have the dictionary on the mobile device. All it needs is gps coords from your phone.
 
FastEddieB said:
It does. When you first launch the app it asks for your preferred language and downloads the appropriate dictionary.
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holy crap, a 27 trillion line database?!?!

OK, so I turned off mobile data, wifi, but left location services on, and it did find my location.
 
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EdFred said:
holy crap, a 27 trillion line database?!?!
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Coding algorithms in digital communications theory doesn't work that way. I'm guessing they are operating on fragments rather than entire coordinates.
 
It only takes 3,000 words to give 27 trillion permutations of 3 words, assuming that repeated words are allowed. Did anyone find their formula yet?

This seems to me to be a proprietary solution to a problem that has been solved with MGRS, with one advantage (three words are easier to hear over a noisy channel than a small handful of digits) and one huge disadvantage (there is no way to know if the square you are in is near another square from their names).

Thankfully, there are already numerous other solutions to the same problem, including Google's "plus codes" (which are basically the same solution as MGRS with a couple of tweaks, and a spec that you can read online for free). Given that the plus codes work with Google Maps, they seem to me a better choice for use by the masses since they will let you communicate your location to someone who can then drive near you with Google Maps, whereas the What3words system requires a translation of coordinates to be used with anything but its own app.

I'll stick with MGRS for all of my ground-based GPSing. MGRS works on the Garmin GNS 430W, my cheap handheld GPS, USGS topo maps, and an app on my phone called MilGPS that I actually use so I have it handy. It is easy to communicate coordinates unambiguously and with just the right precision for your purposes.

And I'll keep using DDmm.mm latitude and longitude for flying purposes, since that's the format that works with sectional charts and most EFBs, although it's very frustrating because occasionally something will use DDMMSS and the only way to find out which is to try different inputs and see what comes up.
 
Well, I messed around with it, and from the 50 or so squares I walked through, none of them were similar. So it's not like a certain area starts with "hikers" and who knows how many times hikers is used as the first word.

Also 3000^3 is 27 billion, not trillion. need another factor of 10 on each word. so 30,000^3
 
EdFred said:
Well, I messed around with it, and from the 50 or so squares I walked through, none of them were similar. So it's not like a certain area starts with "hikers" and who knows how many times hikers is used as the first word.

Also 3000^3 is 27 billion, not trillion. need another factor of 10 on each word. so 30,000^3
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Good point on the math. I was only off by 1 (order of magnitude). :)

I should have checked Wikipedia before even posting, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words
  • Grid of 57 trillion squares, 3x3 meters
  • Addresses available in 36 languages, not direct translations between languages
  • 25,000 words in word list
  • 40,000 words in English word list to cover sea and land (not sure why the sea isn't covered in other languages)
  • Similar location names are deliberately made far apart as a sanity check for users
  • They had a pay-to-play system where you could buy a one-word address for yourself, but that has been cancelled
  • So far, 35 emergency services in England and Wales are giving them money and 8 other countries have apparently adopted this proprietary system as a standard for addressing
 
iamtheari said:
Good point on the math. I was only off by 1 (order of magnitude). :)

I should have checked Wikipedia before even posting, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words
  • Grid of 57 trillion squares, 3x3 meters
  • Addresses available in 36 languages, not direct translations between languages
  • 25,000 words in word list
  • 40,000 words in English word list to cover sea and land (not sure why the sea isn't covered in other languages)
  • Similar location names are deliberately made far apart as a sanity check for users
  • They had a pay-to-play system where you could buy a one-word address for yourself, but that has been cancelled
  • So far, 35 emergency services in England and Wales are giving them money and 8 other countries have apparently adopted this proprietary system as a standard for addressing
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$13.5million for a 16 bit dictionary? You gotta be kidding me...
 
I know a few people who’s addresses are not gps friendly. This would be useful for them. I think there is value in having an easy to remember method to address a specific location. Imagine if I could have told them to drop the pallets in my driveway at horses.spaghetti.alamo and not have to be at home to make sure they don’t put 6000 pounds of rocks in the middle of my driveway.

I just made up horses.spaghetti.alamo, wonder where it is.
 
And who could ever have imagined that extra.juicy.fruit was in Alaska?
 
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