Yeoman plotter
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Yeoman Plotter was a plotter used on ships and boats to transfer GPS coordinates or RADAR echo locations onto a paper navigation chart and to read coordinates from the chart. It was manufactured from 1985 to 2014/2015 and was an intermediary step between traditional paper chart navigation and full electronic chart displays. It was easy to understand for people that were accustomed to paper charts and much cheaper than electronic chart displays available at the time. The continuing fall in prices of electronic chart displays, their increase in functionality such as radar overlay and the advent of cheap tablets eventually made the Yeoman plotter uncompetitive.
Construction
The plotter consists of a plotting surface impregnated with fine wires and a moveable "mouse" containing a sensing ring. The mouse's location on the surface can be electronically sensed.
To use the plotter, a conventional paper chart is first fixed in position on the surface (the method of fixing varies between the different models of plotter; see below). It is then "registered" - the mouse is placed over three known points on the chart and a button pressed at each. Knowing the location on the surface of these points, the system can interpolate the mouse's position anywhere on the chart. In the 1990s charts in some countries had plotter reference points printed on them, and the coordinates of these points were pre-programmed in the Yeoman unit.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yeoman plotter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.