In an insomniac
bout last night, I surfed into the Discovery Channel in the middle of a program
about US armed forces in Afghanistan. In one segment they were showing how
combat controllers (I think that was what they were called, perhaps it was
"forward controllers") perform their duties.
It is their job to
provide target coordinates to air strikes. They do this by sighting
on a target and projecting a waypoint from where they are to the target,
which waypoint they then report to the bombers. They showed a picture of a
bazillion-dollar mil-spec GPS. Then the narrator stated that the soldiers
prefer to use consumer models as they are far lighter and consume batteries much
more slowly, while the film showed a soldier using a clearly-labeled Garmin
Vista to do the waypoint projection.
I'm not posting
this to add ammo to the Garmin-Maggie skirmish here. I just thought it was cool
to be watching it and see them using a piece of gear I've got in my
backpack.
Steve
Team Tierra
Buena