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US Coast Guard Intends To Kill LORAN-C
adaviel writes "LORAN (Long Range Aids to Navigation) is an electronic navigation system using low-frequency radio, used by many boaters (including me) before GPS. It has an approximately 200m accuracy and is a functional replacement in case GPS fails or the US implements selective availability in time of war. The US Coast Guard, part of the Department of Homeland Security, intends to turn it off starting February 8." This is in spite of $160M spent on modernizing LORAN stations over the past 10 years.
It has an approximately 200m accuracy
Wow, I didn't know it was that inaccurate.
and is a functional replacement in case GPS fails or the US implements selective availability in time of war.
If the US implements selective availability of GPS, they can certainly also just turn off Loran-C.
This is in spite of $160M spent on modernizing LORAN stations over the past 10 years.
There's this thing called the Concorde Fallacy that is relevant here. It doesn't matter how much money you spent, all that should matter is anticipated future costs and benefits. And I think for a 200m redundant navigation system, future costs >> benefits.
Last time I saw a LORAN-C device was on my family's sailboat that we used to motor-sail to Alaska from Washington through the Inside Passage. That was 1990. It wasn't much use even at the time. Radar and charts were much more helpful with navigation. I haven't even heard mention of the term LORAN-C for a very long time. I don't think most vessels have a LORAN-C receiver installed anymore. Maybe big ones, but not the hundreds of thousands of small to medium size vessels. Hard to justify keeping it running if nobody is using it. What's the benefit if almost nobody owns the necessary hardware anymore? Just playing Devil's Advocate. I'm sure it's still useful to somebody, somewhere.
This is in spite of $160M spent on modernizing LORAN stations over the past 10 years.
Econ 101: don't make decisions on the basis of sunk costs.
No country wants to maintain them? What are you smoking?
The GPS system is launched and operated by the US Air Force, first and foremost for US military activities. It wasn't some magical pan-national committee that put the satellites into orbit and built the ground stations. And the USAF maintains them and modernizes them. If GPS goes offline, all those fancy GPS guided weapons go offline too.
As for redundancy... put two GPS receivers on your ship.
"Thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people die in Haiti due to a massive earthquake and we're talking about freaking LORAN-C??
Get some PRIORITIES!"
Haiti isn't worthy of discussion. It's tragic, there are lots of tragedies, but that a thing is tragic doesn't make it worth discussion in a tech forum.
Haiti is BTW a hopeless case, the people who live there maintain it so, and their choices aren't my concern. Go to an appropriate forum to whine about Haiti, or go there yourself ("PRIORITIES!") and help out.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Excuse me, fella. This is /., not the Red Cross. Do you really expect us to discuss news stories on here? Why not Reid's remarks about Obama, the Massachussetts senate race, or what ever will Conan O'Brien do now, or your mama's corn bread recipe? Because they are largely irrelevant. You wanna talk earthquakes, go where they are discussed.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
My main worry about this that the GPS system has a particular set of vulnerabilities that either don't exist or are less significant for a terrestrial system. Solar flares and other space environment risks come to mine, as does capture via hacking and attack via interceptor satellites.
Hear hear.
What bugs me is this statement from the Coast Guard:
They're studying whether they NEED a backup so they'll turn off the only current backup before the study is finished or (if required) the replacement backup is deployed?
That's NUTS! What happens if GPS is compromised between the decommissioning of LORAN-C and the deployment of the hypothetical replacement?
Also: Why deploy a DIFFERENT backup and make all the users buy ANOTHER device when they ALREADY HAVE LORAN-C equipment? Even if the equipment was FREE the cost of obtaining it and installing it, multiplied by the number of users, would be astronomical. Unless something damned cheap, built off some other deployed tech, is designed, the cost of maintaining LORAN-C would be a drop in the bucket.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
200m is good for what ? ... No.. lemme tell you.. 200m is NOT good enough !
- Retrieve a crab/lobstrer pot ?
- Retrieve a Man Overboard ?
- Fetch a gill net ?
- Meet with a sister ship during a seine net operation ?
How about:
- Find a port when you're somewhere random in an ocean?
I'd be HAPPY to live with a 200 meter error if I'm trying to, say, get the Golden Gate Bridge to show over the horizon in time to beat a squall line into San Francisco Bay. Or to know if I'm FAR ENOUGH OFF the west coast of North America that I won't be blown onto it before a storm I can't outrun blows by.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The day someone starts blowing up a significant chunk of the ~30 GPS satellites or ~30 GLONASS satellites is the day that GPS accuracy no longer matters because modern society is ending. Attacking GPS is attacking the US military, attacking GLONASS is attacking Russia AND India. It's seriously NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. Again if neither system is being maintained it means 3 of the worlds top economies can no longer afford to maintain a major component of their transportation network, aka the end of civilization.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Alright now lets count the ones you listed that ACTUALLY WORK!
1. GPS... well GPS can't backup itself
2. Galileo, EGNOS. GLONASS... Valid
3. Inertial... On a BOAT, Rocking back and forth, in water that has currents, this is just "Dead Reckoning" but more costly.
4. Visual, aided by Sonar and Radar... Ok this sort of works but only in well documented areas and only if you have the appropriate terrain maps, the Sea is one of the least explored places on the earth by percentage so there's alot of places (namely almost everywhere not along a coast) where this will do no good at all.
5. VOR, other aviation aids... perhaps your best idea
6. Old Fashion Navigation... did you know they called this "Dead Reckoning" for a reason, may as well use inertial sensors.
In summary alot of your ideas are not applicable to anything larger than a Fishing Boat within sight or still in the same channel it started on. Once you got into any open water or traveled any significant distance from your start point the error rate's are just to high to become acceptable. In modern maritime navigation along rivers you need to be able to stay in shipping lanes also, if you don't then you will crash into shore, run aground, or become 2 boats in one with another freighter. The shipping lanes are marked with buoys but its not like you can stop or turn a 1000 ft. freighter on a dime.
You call someone trollish, then pile on the Trek Shtick? Ha. But I digest...
It's more likely they're planning to turn it off because the European GPS equivalent is set to go online soon.
And, you know, it costs money... especially old systems like that. There's probably 25 guys who can fix it still.
It ain't sexy cause Obammy's trying to squeeze blood out of a stone to shore up the deficit
Does it seem stupid to anyone else to disable all of the lower-tec nav aids?
No, it seems stupid to spend millions of dollars on a service that very few people are using anymore.
I guess we can just go back to using sextants if that happens...
Anyone who sails out of sight of land without knowing how to use a sextant is a damned fool.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
All it'll take to turn every one of the satellites in both systems into fried orbital junk is one little hiccup from the sun in the right direction. It is extremely foolish to turn off this system; once off, it will degrade even if left physically in place, and it won't be functional when needed -- which will be very suddenly.
The odds of non-satellite based navigation being needed eventually near 100%. Such solar "hiccups" have happened several times since the middle of last century. Some destroyed equipment on the ground -- and at those energies, nothing in orbit is likely to survive intact. That's not to say we've seen the worst the sun can do, either. Prior to the last century, high energy solar events had only non electronic technologies to induce current in; most likely weren't even noticed beyond a curious increase in corrosion here and there.
It never fails to astonish me how foolish our government can be.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Loran is pretty similar in capabilities and techonology to DECCA, which was widely deployed in Europe. There are some differences in the implementation, but both gives roughly the same precision. The Decca system up here was turned off 1999/2000, as it wasn't considered cost efficient anymore compared to GPS. Decca as I remember it had a number of rather glaring flaws when using it for navigation:
1: Low precision (several hundreds of meters)
2: Varying precision (Depending on the distance and position compared to the masts)
3: Initialization problems (had to be started at a know position, entering the wrong starting location would give you incorrect data)
4: Unwieldy equipment
5: Energy consuming
6: General user-unfriendlyness (you had to be an engineer and take a 2 week course to figure out the equipment we carried on the ships)
Frankly I don't see the need for Decca anymore. If you are in a ship large enough to use Decca you have DGPS anyway. If GPS Is knocked out you go by Radar. If GPS and Radar are knocked out you most likely don't have any Decca system working.
On the navy side it's obviously nice with passive navigational aids (unlike Radar that makes you a neat target). However, a large antenna that has to be in a fixed position is not exactly a hard target for an ARM (Anti-Radiation Missile)... Which means the navy trains to navigate without such aids anyway.
Decca was an impressive system, but it's no longer competitive. Like analog TV we can use the wavelengths for better things. I am pretty sure the situation is the same with Loran.