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Gathering6678today at 2:27 AM2 repliesview on HN

Care to elaborate why? I'm just curious since I didn't know (1) there was actually any kind of serious usage, or (2) there was pushback from rescue team...


Replies

ryankrage77today at 2:36 AM

W3W is very aggressive about protecting their IP, they don't want it to be a standard anyone can use like lat/long.

They advertise it as being useful for search/rescue as you can provide a precise location over an unclear voice channel. They conveniently ignore that speaking numbers is clearer than speaking random words.

I'm sure there's more I'm unaware of.

ianburrelltoday at 4:05 AM

One reason is that there are a lot of similar words in the dictionary. It is easy to mishear the wrong location especially when they are close together. Some of the words are long and complicated. Another is that they are random which means can't navigate from the codes.

They are missing feature of some codes that can have variable length for variable precision.