What3Words for overlanding or remote trails

[FutureBoy]

For those of you who do a lot of overlanding or off-roading, do you use What3Words at all? I would imagine that communicating locations off the beaten path with W3W would be easier than using GPS coordinates. Easier to tell someone where you are or where to meet.

Not sure if regular trail tracking software uses W3W either. It would be a PITA if you had to translate back and forth between W3W and GPS. But if downloaded maps had both values in the map then it might be fairly easy to communicate.

Advertisement

 

[Crissa]

It can do map pins, but yeah, I wish there was more integration.

-Crissa

 

[FutureBoy]

I think this is one of those features that is just being too controlled. W3W is a patented solution that needs to be licensed for use. So most people don’t use it cause they don’t want to pay. But because there are not many people using it, the solution doesn’t get integrated into other processes.

I’m hoping it does actually get put into greater use over time. But based on how little traction it has gotten so far I’m not so hopeful.

 

[ajdelange]

W3W is an excellent example of a solution desperately searching for a problem but I think it's pretty cool. It is really nothing more than augmented Maidehead Squares which was evolved to prevent errors in transmission of position coordinates via radio. Translation between W3W and WGS84 coordinates is pretty simple if you have their wordlist and scrambling polynomial. It took me about a day to program up my own system. Since it's such a simple concept no one wants to pay for its use so I don't think their business plan is too robust. They spend more on litigating patent infringement that they do in running their system.

Cheers from poundage.neurone.allots (my 3 word system - not theirs).

 

[Dids]

Don't you need a communication link to communicate location? Most modern communication links are capable of transmitting data. You probably will never communicate your location by voice so really won't ever need w3w.
Your average 2 way radio has gps built into it and is capable of transmitting it's location to other radios in it's island.
If you are using cell phone are you still using a flip phone? And I think even those could text.
Sat link phones all have gps and can transmit location.
Ahh CB. You are using Citizens Band and you got a trucking convoy!

 

[ajdelange]

If anyone is interested the trick is to build a 3 dimensional table of indices into the scrambled word list: index(num2char(s1) -97,num2char(s2) -97,num2char(s2) -97) where s1, s2 and s3 are the first 3 ascii characters in the word you are looking up. Thus my latitude word is "poundage" the first three letters of which are p, o and u so I look up (index(num2char("p") -97,num2char("o") -97,num2char("u") -97) = index(15,14, 20) = 33751 in my scrambled word list. Looking up the word at 33751 in that list I get "pouched" and then only have to scan from there to 33766 to find "poundage". That, of course, takes very little time. The position of the word in the word list is easily decoded into lattitude band, logitude band and a sub cell number in the "square" bounded by those bands.

Note that the index only contains 26*26*26 = 17576 numbers.

This may be confusing but some of you may remember when dictionaries had thumb tabs at A, B, C... Z. This is the same idea but the thumb tabs are at AAA, AAB, AAC, AAD...ZZX, ZZY,ZZZ. There are only a few words between the pairs of tabs and so you can find a word very quickly.