Location, location, location

Richard DePas richard.depas at gmail.com
Thu Jul 16 05:11:18 PDT 2015


I've used the companion app quite a bit myself. Mainly when boat diving as
I find using the marble pretty easy when choosing the location of a shore
dive. That said, I wonder if the case of multi-marking the same dive
location to get a more accurate GPS fix on it is better handled in the
companion app rather than pushing that function to Subsurface.

I completely understand the want for multiple markings on a dive location -
specifically by boat. When diving a moored, deep shipwreck, that location
can change quite a bit depending on wind direction or current because the
mooring will move. As for a wanting to keep multiple GPS locations for a
very large wreck, I have done that just as Davide by specifying the site
"Milwaukee Car Ferry - Bow" and "Milwaukee Car Ferry - Stern". In reality
they are two different dive sites, just on the same shipwreck.

Companion has parameters in location radius and such so maybe it can be
beefed up a little bit to "suggest" the dive site when marking based on a
previous site within the defined radius. Maybe even asking if you would
like to use the new coordinates or average them. If the user did not want
to use the suggested site, then a new site would be created. But when
creating a new site, I would like to see them automatically unique (such as
- NewSite1, NewSite2, NewSite3,...)

I don't always have the companion app with me, but it it is becoming more
common. When boat diving one of the only ways I have found to get accurate
GPS coordinates for wreck or small reef dives. Don't trust to leave my
phone in the truck in Bonaire so shore diving in a place like that gets a
pin on marble. Wreck diving without a buoy marker can be tough and many
times I have found getting accurate coordinates from others to be a
challenge so the phone with companion app goes with me.

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 2:18 AM Davide DB <dbdavide at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 9:03 AM, Rick Walsh <rickmwalsh at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Now I don't claim my use is representative of everybody else's.
> Personally,
> > I don't want multiple locations for different moorings on the same site
> > (even if I did have the GPS fixes).  But I'm not going to tell anyone
> that
> > they shouldn't use it that way, so therefore it doesn't matter that it's
> > really fiddly to do so.
> >
> > I think the current implementation is an excellent compromise, because
> it's
> > explicit in what it's doing, and it gives you a choice of three
> reasonable
> > options. (1) type a new site name, (2) use an old site name with new
> > coordinates, or (3) use an old site with existing coordinates.  Any of
> these
> > options are very easy to choose, and even if you never plan to use the
> > second option, it doesn't make it harder to click on the second item in a
> > drop-down list to use the third.
>
> +1
>
> Just my 2c. form another perspective:
>
> I use the companion app a lot.
>
> I dove often the same site and I bring the companion app with me
> always so I get dozen of gps data for the same spot.
> For this reason in my current V2 xml file I have a lot of dives in the
> same spot with slightly different gps points (useless) taken with
> different moorings.
> Now in the upcoming V3 xml file I would like to clean all this mess
> unifying all these dives in one dive site with one gps fix
>
> Neverthless there are few cases in which I like to retain different
> gps point for the same spot...
>
> - A huge wreck: sometimes I have a fix for the bow and one for the stern.
> - A huge reef/shoal: slightly different fixes fro different part of it.
>
> But actually they are uncommon cases so I strongly prefer having the
> software helping me with the most common use case.
> Moreover in the above cases I can easily solve the problem naming them
> slightly different. i.e. "Blue Corner - South Wall" & "Blue Corner -
> North Wall".
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>
-- 
- Rich
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