How do you give directions to the fire service when you do not know what road you are on?

You might want to keep mobile data turned off. (Mine costs £2 a day to turn it on.)

Reply to
Max Demian
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I spent 30 years in fire service communications and would have no difficulty with that. Inputting locations using grid references was never considered for the two systems I was involved with and I suspect that the cost of putting in place a system that could accept them would have been expensive and rarely used.

Reply to
Peter Johnson

Peter Johnson used his keyboard to write :

A paper OS map would have been comparatively cheap and shows much more detail than Google does.

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield, Esq.

and how many would you need to access and how long would a paper map last?

Reply to
charles

So how were locations outside a built-up area identified? When did people begin to use postcodes as a means of identifying a place on a map in addition to a postal delivery address. "Between Town 1 and Town 2" could be a long stretch of road, and it would be difficult to identify even if someone read distances off a road sign "Town 1 = 10 miles, Town 2 = 4 miles" if there were very twisty roads.

Given that we're talking about Google maps, we're in the era of online OS maps as well.

Even before that, I'd expect an emergency control room to have all the paper OS maps, maybe unfolded, laminated and mounted on boards for extra durability, for the area that they cover. (*)

I wouldn't regard Google maps as being up to the job of identifying locations given over the phone, because they lack landmarks such as churches, rivers/streams, woodland etc which people might use when specifying a location ("It's near Anytown church, on the road that goes to Anyvillage, just before you get to the stream. Also, Google maps don't have OS grid references printed on them and the search doesn't understand grid references.

Nowadays I'd expect emergency operators to be able to process all location formats: OS grid ref (both all-numeric, and with initial two letter to define the 100x100 km square), lat/long (DDMMSS and DDMM.MMM), postcodes. And maybe things like Three Little Words. And then they should to display that location on an OS map at a suitable scale (1:50,000 and 1:25,000, and maybe 1:10,000 and larger scale in towns, to identify buildings as in "it's near Jones the Butchers").

(*) I remember even in the early 1970s my dad bought several unfolded OS maps of the area where we lived, and he cut them so they joined, and mounted them on a large sheet of chipboard on the wall of his office at home. Not sure why, because he didn't need them for his job, so maybe it was more for interest.

Reply to
NY

I suggest it is mobile phones which cause many of the problems. Before they came along the location of the landline was known to the 999 operator who could pass it on the the services, and most callers would have been able to say what they had done to get /to/ the phone from which the services could work back.

Reply to
Robin

True, but mobile phones have also reduced the time between the incident occurring and the phone call to the emergency services, because people don't have to start searching for a public phone. And a panic, I wonder how many people can give correct instructions of where the incident is in relation to the phone.

With a GPS fix (lat/long or OS, depending on what software is on your phone) the emergency services in the 21 century should be able to pinpoint you. Most in-car satnavs have an emergency-services-location menu option (for those people who bother to work out where it is), and I always have my phone with GPS turned on, so it only takes a few seconds to start GPS Status (other apps are available!) to give a readout in OS "AB 1234 5678" format.

I've heard conflicting stories about how much information about your location is sent by a mobile phone when you make a 999 call: some people say a full GPS reference is sent (assuming GPS is turned on at the phone), some people say the phone estimates its position roughly from knowing which masts it is near, and some people say that no info is sent. I know when my wife called 999 to report an emergency while I was driving, the operator knew exactly where we were and said "you're passing a side-road to X... now!" even before my wife had said where she was. That suggests an accurate and frequently-updated position is passed to them.

Reply to
NY

Our motor home broke down on Jura. We rang the RAC.

Where are you? Jura. Which road are you on? The only one - about half a mile from the ferry. {sigh} What can you see if you look out of the window? Rutting stags! {sigh} We'll get somebody out to you in the next hour.

IIRC it took 4 days. Had to get an HGV rescue truck out from Glasgow because we were too tall to fit on a low loader. That was some serious wild camping.

Cheers

Dave R

Reply to
David

One would hope that emergency services could look at any OS map online.

Tim

Reply to
Tim+

UK Streetmap

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gives access to all the Landranger maps as well as others at various scales.

It also has a useful co-ordinates conversion facility.

For example, ths is a random location on the Isle of Wight:

OS X (Eastings) 443859 OS Y (Northings) 87438 Nearest Post Code PO30 4QP Lat (WGS84) N50:41:06 (50.684951) Long (WGS84) W1:22:50 (-1.380531) Lat,Long 50.684951,-1.380531 Nat Grid SZ438874 / SZ4385987438 mX -153680 mY 6532674 Mapcode GBR 8BD.ZR1 what3words ruffling.alone.amplifier

Reply to
Terry Casey

When I were a lad there were TV adverts encouraging farmers and other remote dwellers to print their OS grid ref in big letters next to the telephone for use when calling the emergency services, so they must have had some mechanism for using it.

Probably a paper map as I don't think "systems" were in use back then.

Owain

Reply to
spuorgelgoog

Of course not - I'm not a child!

Reply to
Dave W

That's a deliberate design decision, so that you know it's wrong.

Some emergency services do use it. As it happens, I was reading an article in Engineering & Technology Magazine just an hour or so ago. Here's the link to the online copy:

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Reply to
Bob Eager

NY expressed precisely :

I have maps around just for local interest. I sometimes also enjoy browsing old maps for areas online, to see how things developed.

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield, Esq.

Assuming that I have the app installed how do I use it when I am on the phone making a 999 call?

Reply to
ARW

Switch to speaker mode and switch to the app, you can then use the app while talking or just ask the operator to hold for a few seconds while you check and then put the phone back to your ear.

SteveW

Reply to
Steve Walker

Then what? I have downloaded the app to my phone and it shows me in my house.

Reply to
ARW

Thank you.

I eventually gave the road as Milton Road and said the field that was on fire backed onto that road.

All they had to do was drive there and look for the field that was on fire. It's not hard to spot.

And the lads did an excellent job of putting out the fire, mostly by hand at first, I assume water was used when they could get a truck into the field.

Reply to
ARW

Coordinates from your sat nav or smart phone that does GPS?

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

In message <qik77c$va5$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, at 17:32:40 on Fri, 9 Aug 2019, NY snipped-for-privacy@privacy.invalid remarked:

The phone doesn't estimate its cellsite position, it's done in the network (which already needs to know roughly where you are for the purposes of hand-offs between masts).

Of course, additional layers of location services software (like Google mapping) can then send the answer back to the phone so they can display it to the person holding it.

Reply to
Roland Perry

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