When I was in the USAF I went to school on a doppler nav system. It shot three beams of radar down to the ground and measured the doppler shift for speed of travel and had a mechanical analog computer. It didn't last long because the radar beams violated radio silence or so we were told.
But the mechanical computer was magnificent, full of gears and mechanical differentials for intregating data. As for the cam: for inputting compass variation a cam about the size of kiwi fruit was used. The cam rotated around it's shaft axis for longitide and the cam follower moved parellel with the cam's shaft for latitude. The distance from the cam's shaft to the follower (radius of the cam) varied to read off variation. Norm S/V Bandersnatch Lying Julington Creek FL N30 07.68 W081 38.47 > Right... the only place I've seen those (IBM tabulators, as I recall) > was in a museum of computing, somewhere in California. They also had a > mechanical computer that used a beautifully shaped cam for integration; > just great stuff, branches of development we ended up not following > because electrons were so much easier to juggle. > _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
