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THE stories are many and varied – and sometimes hilarious; that's the unpredictability of satnav.
Drivers who have ended up in duck ponds, almost off the edge of cliffs, wedged under footbridges, in the middle of farmers' fields.
For those who rely on satnav as a means of navigation, they have sometimes found to their cost, that getting from A to B has steered them towards a vocabulary which sometimes starts with F.
Now me, well I don't have satnav. I have a big book, tatty round the edges now, which contains a series of something called maps.
Which would be all well and good if I could follow one properly. I hold up my hands – like many women this is not one of my strengths.
It's something to do with hormones and spatial awareness apparently. I can read road signs of course and follow detailed written instructions but any deviation can meet with disaster. I have no sense of direction. I freely admit it.
My other half, on the other hand, has satnav. But I sometimes wonder if this (like me) has any sense of direction either.
Take the other weekend, for example, when we were discovering the delights of the North Yorkshire Moors and calling in at little villages with friendly-sounding names like Hutton-le-Hole, Slapewath and Newton under Roseberry.
We had a map so we didn't really need the satnav but it was there in the background all the same, just like the TV in the corner of the living room. Switched on but with nobody watching.
And it did, I have to say, provide a good source of amusement.
It was fun to see the arrow, which should have been pointing us to our destination, whizzing round aimlessly every time we encountered what it must have deemed to be a black hole.
In the depths of the North York Moors National Park, where every few hundred yards you have to give way to sheep crossing the road – at their own pace – the satnav might as well have been on Mars for all the help it was.
If we had followed it faithfully we would probably still be waiting for a farmer to pull us out of some deserted ditch somewhere.
But for those of you who have become dangerously dependent on your satnav, be warned – the 20-year-old Global Positioning System (GPS) that makes it work, could soon fail.
GPS devices calculate position using four orbiting satellites and a minimum of 24 satellites is required to keep the network running.
There are 31 operating now but many are past their sell-by date apparently and a US Air Force programme to replace them is way behind schedule.
So dust off those maps and learn to read them.
It's not really that difficult. Remember, the hardest bit is folding them up again afterwards.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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