DED Reckoning Question

The rdf provided two bearings to known, radio tower, locations thus a fix.

You then ded reckoned to the next location and everything along your path was an estimate or EP. When you found the buoy you had a new known location therefore a fix.
What he demonstrated was starting at a known fix then using ded reckoning to go top another location then confirming that the estimates were ok by sighting the buoy for a fix.
 
Ded Reconing (thanks Bruce I never knew...) is something you can do pretty well in daylight with good visibility.

Boating out of Seward AK, I used the Fog horn Code Transmitter and the Seward Radio station to keep track of my position in the Fog.

Flying from Fbks to Anc we used three different stations to keep track of our place on the chart. That's not DED reckoning though. We always had radio contact with Anchorage Central cause' they can see what's in them clouds.

Another case of DED Reckoning is when you start out in a small boat and your destination is out of site over the Horizon. You go forward, keeping a course without Compass etc. Just the Clouds or some other feature. Looking back at your wake to make sure your not in a big turn.
Finally the Horizon begins to show. Now you look for some feature you can steer toward.

If there is a Tide, as in crossing the Straight of Juan de Fuca, you may notice the bow is always pointed to the feature, but the boat is sorta turned at an angle.
Experience tells you that your taking the long way around.

Finally the Horizon is more distinct and you can begin looking for your target. You DED Reckoned to your target.
 
Well, the pilots in the TV show referred to "DED reckoning" as staying below the clouds and use visible landmarks. I call that flying under Visual Flight Rules. I guess those bush pilots up there create their own definitions which everyone understands up there.
 
FYI - the term "Dead Reckoning" is correct, not "Ded Reckoning". It is thought, but not known for sure to be originated from the word deduced.
 
Flying just under the Clouds was called "Scud running" when I first heard about it in Ohio.

I always thought "Dead" was referring to keeping the Target dead ahead all the time.
DED as in Deduced is probably right, but most Americans would had said "Dead".
 
I think Dead Reckoning might be relatged to Dead Ahead
 
I think dead reckoning means if yer wrong...yer dead[:I]

I got one of the old RDF that works on 'radio stations'. It's even battery operated for emergencies. Trouble is the PO left the old batteries in and things got corroded.:(
 
had one of them too. The darn thing actually worked if you knew where the radio towers were located and could find two spaced far enough apart. It helped that old stations would announce their call letters after every song so you could be sure what station you were aiming at in the fog while bouncing around in a little sailboat trying to figure out how to avoid sailing to Africa. There also were radio beacons that were more precise MoA was out there somewhere. I don’t think I ever did find it.
 
"There is disagreement about the derivation of the phrase. It is sometimes thought (particularly among sailors and pilots in the USA[3]) to come from deduced reckoning and is sometimes given in modern sources as an alternatively spelled ded reckoning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase dead reckoning dates from Elizabethan times (1605–1615).[4] The popular etymology from deduced is not documented in the OED or any other historical dictionary. It is not clear what 'dead' might mean in the context of dead reckoning, and several alternative theories have been promulgated" -- from Wikipedia
 
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