Slawek, Couldn't agree more with you about the attraction of sextants.
But, I feel I must disagree with you about your final sentence. We are not "watching the beginning of an end of the glorious sextant era". It actually ended the day the price of GPSs dropped below $1000. Now that GPS are < $US400, sextants are an interesting curiosity of the past. Same as slide rules. I mourn their passing, but I LOVE what I can do with my GPS. I don't know if I raved about it before... I have bought 1:250,000 scale topographic maps of Australia on CD (as tiff files). Load them onto my notebook. Load georef files (small files that tell the computer that a certain x y position of the cursor on the screen is the same as a certain lat/long). Attach a cable linking the GPS to the notebook. Load some software (OziExplorer, cost about $US50) and off I go. Tracks my route in real time as I drive. Plus lots of other features. More and more maps (AND nautical charts) are available on CD. The USGS sells CDs for each 1 degree square. Each CD has all the maps of that quadrangle from small scale to large scale. This is actually very inconvenient if all you want is coverage of e.g. Arizona at 1:250,000. The USGS basically told me to go to hell (a very intelligent response to a client waving his credit card at you!) They were not willing to burn a custom CD for me. So I went to a company called LandInfo and they were really helpful. Micropath appear to offer similar service. LandInfo: http://www.landinfo.com/ Micropath: http://www.micropath.com/ USGS digital raster graphics: http://mcmcweb.er.usgs.gov/drg/ Software: OziExplorer: http://www.powerup.com.au/~lornew/oziexp.html There are specific sites on the web devoted to GPS (in general, not particular brands.) These have reviews of OziExplorer and competitive software, and various hardware. Also discuss Y2K and GPS (basically no problem with most brands). I have lost my bookmark to these URLs. Sorry. So, back to sextants: buy a good one now as an investment for your grandkids. Production will rapidly cease and they will start appreciating in value. Bit sad, but then look what happened to sundials! John
