Fixing

Fixing is the term used for the act of determining the ship’s position at a fixed moment in time. Fixing is always retrospective, i.e., it tells you where the ship was now the fix was taken. Strictly, this is true even for fixing by continuous GPS feed, but the latency is so limited that GPS can be taken to be a real or near real time position. For other fixing methods, the latency may be only a few seconds up to a few minutes or even more.