Satnav query,

[ken]

Google maps can do it trivially.

[mm0fmf]

Exactly. The whole raison d'etre of W3W is you just give three words. But they never had the words checked for silly close calls. As soon as you need extra info you may as well have stuck with existing systems.

[Roger Mills]

I accept that it has limitations when sharing the words using audio over a phone connection but, in the Op's case, the words could be sent electronically. there wouldn't then be a problem.

[John Rumm]

If you open google maps and right click on the area of interest, it will show the GPS co-ordinates:

On my real tom tom, it had the option to send a text via a paired phone that included the current location.

[Bob Eager]

Doesn't work miles from anywhere.

[NY]

WTW is a good idea badly implemented. Bad in the sense that they allow homonyms and plurals which lead to ambiguity, and that there isn't checksum so the recipient can tell whether the location has got garbled.

If you are sending your WTW location by text (email, Text message, Skype etc) it's fine as long as you copy from the WTW app and paste into the message and the recipient does the same in reverse. That avoids transcription errors.

But if you are dictating your location in spoken form (either face-to-face or via a comms link such as telephone) then the problem with homonyms and plurals comes into play. I suppose the only saving grace is that AFAIK (*) any two locations that are ambiguous because of homonyms or plurals are a long way apart, so it is usually fairly obvious which is the correct one.

There are other ways of giving locations. About 10-15 years ago motorways and trunk roads started using signs of the form "M1 A 123.4" which give the name of the road, the direction (A=towards the datum point / B=away from the datum) and the distance in km from a fixed datum point for the road. But that is not perfect. In the early days I happened to be driving late at night and I saw a crash on the opposite carriageway. Just in case no-one had yet reported it, I rang 999 using my hands-free, and said something like "The accident is about 1 mile north of sign M1 A 123.4 on the opposite B carriageway" (1 mile because that's how far I'd travelled between seeing the crash and talking to the

999 operator). And the police operator was utterly clueless as to how to use that information :-( He wanted the postcode (WTF - arbitrary locations where there are no buildings don't usually have postcodes and even if they do, a passing stranger isn't likely to know the postcode) or else the junction number that I had last passed (sorry, I'm somewhere a long where from the junction where I joined and the one where I'll be leaving, so I've no idea which junction I'm near). I even offered to stop on the hard shoulder and give him the number from the marker posts every 100 metres, but his system wouldn't have been able to interpret that either, he said.

I reported this situation to the police force when I got home and had a very appreciative response saying that they'd located my phone call and said I'd given a clear and unambiguous location, and that the operator in question would receive more training. The signs are put there for safety-critical reasons such as reporting car crashes, and this operator had caused the system to fail.

(*) To quote Esther Rantzen in That's Life "Unless you know differently".

[NY]

There can also be the problem that mapping sites may show the centre-point of the postcode in the wrong place. When we moved to our present house 4 years ago, I happened to search for our new postcode in Google Maps. And it placed the dot on a different road in the village which was about 300 metres away as the crow flies but about 2 km away by road because you have to backtrack to a bridge over a stream and then come back on the other side.

I checked Streetmap.co.uk and Bing Maps, and they both placed the dot in the same place, maybe 200 metres from our house, and on our road. I found a way to report errors on Google Maps, and although I never had a response, I noticed a month or so later that Google had corrected the error and were placing the dot in the same place as other mapping software - a location which matched the one in the Royal Mail Postcode Database.

The other problem with using postcode plus house number is when houses on the road don't have numbers, only names. With the exception of a few houses in a Victorian terrace, all the houses on our street only have names. It makes it bloody hard for people to tell whether they are getting close because names are not in any predicable order, whereas if someone happens to spot a house number of 123, they know that 129 will be a couple of houses away and *probably* on the same side of the road, assuming that one side has odd-numbered houses and the other side has even numbered ones (OK, that tends not to be the case for a cul-de-sac where houses are usually numbered consecutively up one side, round the blind end and back down the other side).

[S Viemeister]

True. The road my house is on, has no name, and the house has no number, just a name.

I add directions when ordering stuff -

'The first house on the left, on the xxxx road, just opposite xxxx Farm. If you see the sign for xxxx, you've gone too far - turn around and go back'.

[Fredxx]

I agree, but in general if you know the area such as a postcode, most errors are going to be obvious. Perhaps I'm cynical in nature over human error and like to have some independent verification.

That is how I have used it. If you send a WhatsApp message you can open W3W which can then open a SatNav application. Even then I might ask clarification. Last time I was sent a W3W location it was a short distance away from the final destination, presumably down to their mobile GPS error.

I have heard 4 words would have been better, otherwise for 3 words some obscure words and plurals are needed.

I suspect they might be able to get your location from mobile towers if need be.

W3W would be ideal in that situation, with giving the road number as a means of validation.

That was my understanding, though I thought the closest was 9 miles?

[Rod Speed]

Fredxx [e-mail] wrote

If you are going to do it that way, makes a lot more sense to just send the google maps link instead so there is no possibility of the recipient mangling the 3 words when passing it on to someone else.

Makes more sense to use google maps which most do now anyway.

Too much farting around.

Doesnt happen with google maps.

Nope. Not quickly enough.

Google maps link works MUCH better and doesnt need the sender to remember to add the road number

[Andy Burns]

Or use PlusCodes, e.g.

Apparently you can alter the resolution as well as the location by tweaking the bits before and after the plus, but I haven't figured out how to do that "by hand".

[Paul]

Find yourself in Google Earth, extract lat and long ?

Some smartphones have a gps built in.

A GPS allows deriving latitude, longitude and time-of-day. The GPS I bought, was bought for time-of-day purposes, but it can also give the coordinates.

Using Google Earth, you could even do a pictorial turn-by-turn to show how to get there. This is good if showing a route to a rural cottage and for which the roads (such as they are), have no markings.

Paul

[RJH]

+1

[Joe]

Some satnavs don't anyway. I had an old TomTom which wouldn't work off-road, even though there were roads on all sides within a mile. If I wasn't actually on a road, it couldn't place me.

Also, some Android phones don't actually have a GPS receiver, and use cell towers and wifi (remember the Google car 'accidentally' recording wifi locations?) and presumably extrapolation between fixes.

[Jethro_uk]

Even when it's in the right place, it can be useless.

I once did some R&D into using postcodes to direct our drivers to the exact spot of an LPG tank, rather than the billing address. In one test we got to the sat navs postcode centroid and were a 15 minute drive from the actual location which was 200 meters from there only the other side of a motorway.

apparently in Norfolk there is a single postcode that covers a 7 mile road.

[Colin Bignell]

I'm sure it has. It is just that I have never needed to use them as it has always managed to find the address, in the UK, France, Belgium and Germany.

[Jethro_uk]

I would be amazed if many of those are being used as sat navs though.

[Brian Gaff]

The app What three words is your friend. Works very well indeed as long as both have a smart phone to run it on.

Brian

[Jethro_uk]

Are there any on sale now that don't ?

[Mike Clarke]

It also doesn't allow for confusion due to different dialects. For example the word 'work' pronounced with a strong geordie accent is likely to be interpreted as 'walk' by some people.