Sun shooter HP 41 module?

[Gene]

Sun Shooter module on e*ay

Anyone know about this module? It says Sun Shooter Coop module. Surveying? Pardon my posting this, but I was curious and couldn't remember seeing the Sun Shooter name.

[Mark Hardman]

This module is referenced in a thread that you started in 2002.

**** item...manual only, but anyone ever seen the module

Don't you remember?!?!?!

Mark Hardman

[d b]

-History;
I believe it was one of the many ROMs made by Surveyors Co Op, a group of surveyors who agreed on which flags and scratch registers were what and wrote comprehensive land surveying programs for the HP41. They also marketed a truly huge EPROM box for the 41 for data storage which contained the fixes for mass storage through the IL that the CX never had. Their stuff was flawless within the limits of the hp41 platform. They somehow became Tripod Data Systems, which sold a bazillion cards for the 48 series. These were somewhat less robust.
-Your answer;
If used with a current ephemeris and a well set clock on the cx, the sunshooter would aid the surveyor in finding his location as he observed the leading or trailing edge of the sun. I never had that ROM, or the need to do that but i did learn how to do it long hand in school and having a program to do the tedious math would have been a great help. As you can imagine; there is a lot to it what with swizzling the tangent screws, hitting keys, moving you head to negate parallax, and mumbling prayers to the dark gods of surveying - all at once. Then doing it several times to average out your residuals and setting & averaging out backsights into a good one.
-Addendum;
This was mostly done in places like the back side of Nevada, Alaska, Australia and other unsurveyed areas or places without "tight control". It became obsolete when GPS became cheap and the art and science of surveying began to be replaced by pushing buttons on a black box and making excuses for why the computer is down today. I'm not sure if the Sunshooter would also aid in doing the same thing for night time observations of Polaris, for which there were ephemeri published also.

[Diego Diaz]

Hi,

Although not hi-res, the picture is the ad shows a CMT-10 type module.

These are EPROM modules so it's up to the owners/users/manufacturers to burn whatever they want into the memory... much like a 'rudimentary' and ultra-expensive Clonix... (sort-of) :-)

Enjoy!.

Diego.

[Geoff Quickfall]

Gene,I see you are a junior member with only 5 post. As you progress with this site you will be allowed to ask the hard questions :-)

Merry Christmas, the mail box is being checked!

Geoff