Handheld GPS
This story apparently happened word for word like this in real life in Mike’s job, haha!
Talking about GPS: The technology itself is amazing to begin with. But it’s even more amazing, how commonplace GPS is in our daily lives by now. I remember those things being obscure, rare and prohibitively expensive devices. Now I’ve got Google Maps on my mobile phone. I used to pride myself in being able to plan routes and either memorizing them or printing out maps. And for the longest time, I would refuse to use GPS or the like in the car, because I didn’t need them. But one cannot stay a luddite forever. So after getting lost of getting stuck in a traffic jam a few times, I now use those things all the time. Especially because they also tell you when there’s traffic and reroute you.
PEZ dispensers, on the other hand, don’t seem to have improved that much over the same time. But maybe that’s because that technology has already been perfected!
Stef
I have used Garmin GPS units for over thirty years for my work as a Service Engineer. My patch was the whole North of England, there is not enough room in my car for that many City maps. Ther unit also provided backup for aviation maps when flying.
Oddly enough, I now use a “road” GPS with my maps for aircraft navigation, having installed an aviation database upon it, and A Garmin GPSmap 496 aircraft unit for road nav, as it has Garmins Mapsource installed on it. I like the “old fashioned” style of map that mapsource provides.
So… how many times has Chuck seen “Maverick” so far?
Working for a large airline, on a 747 200, a flight engineer used to put his gps antenna out of the “smoke* hole when flying. Years later, on 747 400, i got a call they wanted me in the flight deck. Pilot reported his gps wasn’t working… i said wow, when did they install that? Proceeded to find and cycle the cbs, fixed! Maintenance didn’t always get news of avionics updates.