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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.
and I speak for the Cs -I mean Seas
-I'm just sayin'
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.
What's Loran-C some strange C dialect? Did Loran-C++ eat its lunch or something.
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.
Of course you would need an accurate clock and maybe a sextant?
As for the comment on "only 200 meters", that might not even be all the way to the other end of the ship.
I was under the impression that selective availability is still more accurate than 200 meters.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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I believe the GPS III constellation will be the modernization effort you're looking for.
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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.
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.
Wait -- they're talking about decommissioning a redundant technology and relying on one that the military spends millions on and is mission-critical to its functioning (and thus in no danger of suddenly going offline)? Why is this sudden outbreak of common sense being maligned? I wish our government did this more often!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
And on top of that, other GPS-like systems are being built. Yes, Galileo has been delayed, but it will eventually be launched nonetheless. And it's not the only one.
Linux user since early January 1992.
There is absolutely no use for Loran C. You currently have the following systems in place backing each other up. Many cheaper and better. In fact, many of these most likely will vanish soon.
1. GPS, LAAS, WAAS, DGPS
2. Galileo, EGNOS,
(as well as GLONASS and Baidu)
3. Inertial
4. Visual navigation (computer with terrain sensors, including sonar and radar)
5. Also VOR, DME, ADF, NDB, ILS, TLS, MLS, Marker beacon
with the final fallback
6. Old fashion navigation with compass, light houses, sextant, chronometer etc.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
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.
"This is especially idiotic considering GPS satellites that are currently in orbit are beginning to fail, and no country wants the responsibility of modernizing them, or repairing them."
Okay...
1. The DOD depends on GPS and matains the network. So what are you talking about countries wanting to take responsibility for the GPS network? The US DOD does.
2. You do not repair or modernize GPS satellites... You replace them.
3. GPS is going to keep working until it is replaced with something else or the US stops being a nation.
"Further, what if a GPS receiver goes offline on a ship?"
You use the backup? You don't really think that a ship would only have one do you?
The reason to keep both was that many operators spent a lot of money on Loran and GPS was expensive. Now GPS is cheaper and more reliable than Loran.
Your arguments are along the lines of "We should keep paying for hitching posts on our streets so we can keep horses as a back up for cars."
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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Except the US.
So what happens when GPS doesn't work anymore?
Given the military use of GPS, that's unlikely.
Further, what if a GPS receiver goes offline on a ship?
If A GPS receiver goes offline on a ship, you turn on any of the leventy-dozen other GPS receivers on board, including the handheld you bought for a hundred dollars that outperforms the models available just five years ago.
You simply can't get the handheld performance from LORAN that you can from GPS, and it is no big loss for the US LORAN chains to be turned off.
[[citation needed]] - GPS sats are failing
"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."
I don't know ask sig hansen
This isn't terribly shocking. Both agencies also wasted millions of tax payer dollars on the failed "Deep Water" initiative, which sought to modernize some of the Coast Guard's old vessels: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/17/60minutes/main2823448.shtml
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
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.
What a complimentary system sounds like: "My, what a nice position. That lat/long looks so good on you."
Of course, such a system would only be useful as a complement.
This is in spite of $160M spent on modernizing LORAN stations over the past 10 years.
Do you know how many times that the government shits out every day on projects they know will probably never see the light of day? It's so bad at this point that I find 160 million into a 10 year old functional project (open to the public, no less) to be the bargain rate.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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.
Coasties all know that the way to get a sweet station assignment like Station Lake Tahoe is to spend a year in attu. I wonder what the new pipeline will be.
$16M/year is nothing to the government, they've just been keeping it on life support for 10 years. Even if SA is turned back on, GPS will be accurate enough for commercial navigation and the system proven reliable enough. Let LORAN-C pass.
Receivers aren't cheap? Shit, they give out GPS units in cereal boxes these days. They're cheap as hell. They're so cheap they aren't even a differentiating feature on phones anymore, just expected.
At least my recollection is that while the absolute accuracy of LORAN isn't nearly as good as GPS, it actually had better repeatability (i.e. the ability to return tomorrow to that fishing spot you found today) than at least pre-DGPS/WAAS GPS did.
Today's modern GPS systems and supplemental accuracy aids probably make this moot, but it's a major reason why LORAN has survived as long into the GPS era as it did.
G.
Frankly, I'm surprised this is still around. Everyone I know has switched over from LORAN-C to GPS or other systems at least a decade ago. Even aside from the cost of maintaining the system to the government, the system is clearly inferior to GPS. For one, since the towers are much lower compared to satelites, it is much easier to have your signal blocked. The system isn't nearly as accurate (as mentioned in the summary) and is also in many contexts much more likely to simply fail. The system also doesn't work if one is far away from land. This is an extremely reasonable cost-saving measure.
The Coast Guard is going to "kill" LORAN? This choice of words worries me. What if LORAN decides to strike first, out of self-defense?
"LORAN", "SKYNET", both are short words with an 'N' in them. COINCIDENCE? I think not!
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
In my pilot weather briefings, I routinely get notice that one of the satellites (GPS-25, I think) is out of service, and I think GPS-30 showed up in a briefing recently, too.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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
I visited Cape Race, NL which has both a LORAN-C station and a DGPS station. Looking at the two I don't blame the USCG for getting rid of LORAN-C, the LORAN-C has a nice & large radio tower, as well as a giant room with huge motors spinning around, mainframes that look like they're from the 60s. And since it's so far up North, you have to heat the room in the winter and cool it in the summer. On the contrast, the DGPS site was a couple of racks in a trailer. and 4 6m-ish towers around it. The heating cooling costs are much less and most of the maintanance is just scraping the snow/ice off the towers when it snows :-). Combine this wit the fact that no-one really uses LORAN-C anymore, it's not hard to see why
Loran-C may be obsolete, but the enhanced eLoran does make for a good backup system to GPS. It's accurate to about 10 meters or so with modern receivers.
No, Galileo and Glonass are not good backups to GPS, because they are also satellite-based and rely on the reception of weak microwave signals, just like GPS. Those signals can (and do) get jammed, and can even be spoofed under the right conditions. Differential GPS or other GPS augmentation systems aren't even backups at all, as they rely on the main GPS signals being present in order to operate. Loran-C and eLoran are land-based, long wave signals that are very hard to jam. It is most useful in places and under conditions where GPS has problems. And in spite of how popular GPS is, there are definitely areas where it has problems.
The UK and other countries have committed to eLoran for the next 10 to 15 years, so it's not like Loran-based systems are totally going away. They see the benefit of having a truly redundant positioning system, why doesn't the US?
LORAN stations are ground stations. If the Chinese (or other enemy. The Chinese are the ones who have actually demonstrated the capability) execute a satellite intercept strike on a sufficient number of satellites, there goes GPS availability for a region.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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
Wasn't Kai the last of the LORAN-C?
Loran-C has been used for distributing TDM network clocking by at least one major long distance telephone carrier, before they all switched over to GPS. I wonder if they got all the equipment converted (or switched to SONET or later non-TDM packet-based stuff)?
Some boxes referencing to Loran-C and some to GPS would work so well that the omission might not be noticed. Until the Loran-C shuts down and the boxes start to lose sync. The resulting frame slips would make little "clicks" in any legacy phone connections. But data traffic could get hit big time.
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.
I've been a sailor most of my life. We haven't used Loran C seriously for almost two decades. Most boats don't even have Loran receivers any more. It's GPS all the way whether you are a casual sailor or a commercial ship captain. In fact, large commercial ships are required to use GPS and special transceivers these days (the boater's equivalent of GPS-based aircraft systems). If backup matters one could pack a RDF or maybe even a sextant, but frankly GPS has not failed even once from the day it became available to boaters. Besides, Loran C pretty much only works near the coastline of major industrialized nations (or did)... it wouldn't be all that helpful if you were lost at sea.
The coast guard should have abandoned Loran C years ago.
-Matt
LORAN-C towers are a hell of a lot more vulnerable than a satellite constellation. Have you ever visited one? Some of them are located in the most god-awful corners of the planet. They're set in woods, swamps, mountains, and other remote places. Anybody who wanted to disable one badly enough could do it with a small group of people, because there's no more than a couple of token guards present. But nobody on the planet apart from a few governments or billion dollar corporations can touch the satellites, which are located in MEOs, not LEOs.
I will give you cheap: the cost of LORAN-C is a fraction of the cost of GPS. But to what end? Why continue to pour any more of my money into a technology that is NOBODY's primary navigational system? Right now it's no more than an inaccurate backup system, a job it was not built to perform. And it will never become more than that.
LORAN-C is being used and maintained only for a handful of commercial shipping concerns. Nobody in the general public uses it (if you tell me you have a LORAN-C based TomTom on your car's dashboard, I'm calling you a liar in advance.) If the shipping companies think that LORAN-C is worth it as a backup, then they can damn well pony up the money to keep it going as a private company. Otherwise, pull the plug and auction off the towers today. We don't need it.
John
eLoran being used by UK - sucks to be a Brit in US waters.
At least we've still got Omega.
D'oh!!!
Anyone got a sextant I can borrow?
As trollish as your post is, I would wager that it is more than a little likely that LORAN is being turned off precisely because it is a beacon based system that selective availability cannot be implemented over. There is no way that LORAN could be used to provide positioning data to select parties.
Personally, I don't think this is a safe thing to do. Maritime equipment is notorious for being long lived. I would highly doubt that there are no boats that are still dependent on legacy systems. Well, I guess this is one way to ensure that they upgrade.
Feb 8:
First Officer: Captain! We've lost navigational systems!
Captain: Damn! That can mean only one thing. Arm photon torpedoes!
First Officer: Err.... we're a 32 year old fishing trawler and we don't have any...
Captain: Quiet! There's no time! Transfer engineering to the bridge and make sure we've got warp if we need it.
I hate printers.
If they kill Loran, who's going to pilot the White Doll??
Bow-ties are cool.
As for redundancy... put two GPS receivers on your ship.
Give every person on board a cheap GPS reciever to carry around.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
In my pilot weather briefings, I routinely get notice that one of the satellites (GPS-25, I think) is out of service, and I think GPS-30 showed up in a briefing recently, too.
Yeah there is a data service called RAIM which delivers real time GPS quality information.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
you might as well rename the Concorde Fallacy - let's forget that we lost the house and the car, and remember that we can get 50 cents on each dollar invested!
This is my sig.
The Australians who protested against the construction of our LORAN station can now count their activities as a Job Well Done.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
What, exactly, are we supposed to say about Haiti? Would that not be about a 10 post thread?
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Glonass cannot truly be considered a viable backup for GPS since both are space based and subject to space based attacks from aliens, or from changing laws of physics, or from massive asteroid attacks.
As for redundancy... put two GPS receivers on your ship.
Suppose that someone shoots down enough GPS satellites to disable the GPS system. What then? I'm in favor of some sort of backup system.
It's difficult to shoot down satellites, but not impossible.
That said, I have to assume that ships could still navigate the old-fashioned way, with an sextant, a chronometer, and some charts. You can automate the calculations, so you just take the readings with the sextant and put the numbers in to a computer program. It is even possible to automate the whole process, although nobody seems to bother anymore in these days of GPS.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/12/05/2350233.shtml
Loran A that I was using around 1970. In mid-Atlantic you couldn't get signals during the day and accuracy was around 1 nm, but it certainly was nice to have.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
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.
Yeah, it'd be a shame if our country couldn't maintain a major component of our transportation network.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
At the time of the missile attack, the LORAN station was under the command of Lt. Ernest DelBueno, who panicked and attempted to evacuate his American crew by calling in a U.S. Navy transport helicopter from Helicopter Combat Support Squadron Four (HC-4), abandoning the Italians on his base, and in the community on the other end of the island.
Wow, way to live up to your uniform there buddy......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
LORAN-C towers are a hell of a lot more vulnerable than a satellite constellation. Have you ever visited one? Some of them are located in the most god-awful corners of the planet.
New Jersey? ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
unless of course you have verizon. then that cheap as chips chip is not available to you-unless you pay 160 per year.
My mother was one of the people rescued by the CG in the 1937 floods referenced in the CG article. You can be sure that *I* am glad that she was... I sure wouldn't be here if she hadn't been rescued.
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
...They are shutting LORAN-C off because it's expensive to maintain a separate system, especially one that is not nearly as accurate as GPS, and is at risk of terrestrial attack...
But -- isn't the Loran C low frequency operation better able to punch a signal through periods of poor RF "weather"? During heavy solar storm activity (sunspots, peaking each 11 years) I hear it's sometimes kind of hard to get signals through, especially the S or K band stuff used for satellite communications. I remember during the Pioneer satellite days that it was sometimes quite a job for us to pull the signal out of the noise (clever use of FFT mostly). Satellites don't have huge power budgets. Larger antennae help, but you're still looking at a few watts at most.
And a submarine could still use Loran C if its inertial guidance system goes out of whack, without surfacing, I think, as I believe you can acquire a low frequency signal more easily at depth. In a worst-case situation, such as the massive EMP hit of a nuclear weapons discharge, I'd think that Loran would be back on line before you could read a satellite. Mind, we'd have worse problems, but I'd think the military would need to consider this sort of thing.
I guess it ain't sexy 'cause it's analog.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
If there's someone shooting down US military satellites you're probably better off lost at sea.
And your GPS satellites got blasted out of orbit or a solar storm wipes out all of those satellite resources?
Your SONET networks and cell phone stuff are gonna need it. Your 8-VSB exiter may as well. Single Freq. Networks.
Where do you get an accurate reference from?
WWV? I haven't seen anything other than a GPS reference at any telco facility/cell site. If there ever is a loss of GPS, it's gonna be interesting.
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.
Glonass cannot truly be considered a viable backup for GPS since both are space based and subject to space based attacks from aliens, or from changing laws of physics, or from massive asteroid attacks.
These are all incredibly important points, but it's important to remember that terrestrial-based systems such as Loran run exactly the same risks.
It's the end of an era I guess. This story throws me back to 1964, wandering the North Atlantic aboard HMSS Hudson, doing marine geophysical surveys.
When it came to positioning, we left nothing to chance; we had the requisite equipment (pre-computer), tables and charts for LORAN, DECCA, CONSOL and the brand-new, edge of the technical envelope, VLF. Sometimes we used a few of them together, with transparent overlays giving a very small polygon containing, somewhere within it, our little ship. We liked to brag that we could pin down our position within its length.
One of my favourite duties was radar watch and navigation, especially late at night, lights dimmed, phosphorous glow from both the radar screen and the froth on the waves ahead. Transferring readings from the radios and charting our course made me an integral part of the process, acutely aware of the immensity of the ocean around us and challenged to keep us from losing our way. I can still smell the mixture of diesel, coffee and ammonia (from the weather fax machine) that permeated the bridge.
Now, with the retiring of LORAN, it's finally all gone, replaced by an LCD display your grandmother can use. Sad.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
It's difficult to shoot down satellites, but not impossible [washingtonpost.com].
Note that was a satellite in low-Earth orbit. It's a *lot* harder to shoot down something in geosynchronous orbit like a GPS satellite.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
>because it is a beacon based system that selective availability cannot be implemented over
You forget why selective availability was turned off.
During the years of Selective Availability, if you took your GPS receiver to a "known point" (like a USGS marker), you could adjust for the "fuzzing" (it wasn't a real fuzzing, it was just an offset) of the signal and get accurate readings anyway. This is known as "Differential GPS" and was widely used by people having an interest in using it (land surveyors, civilian navigation, etc).
Differential GPS made selective availability useless as a security tool.
Turning off LORAN isn't about being able to turn SA back on again. It's about costs.
--
BMO
Okay, correcting myself - the GPS constellation isn't in geosynchronous orbit, but it's a damn sight higher up than LEO. :-)
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I could be interested in the corn bread recipe.
New Jersey? ;)
Like I said ...
Anyway, I was thinking of the Baudette, Minnesota tower. It is truly in a deservedly ignored corner of the planet. It is located at the northern end of one of the largest peat bog swamps in America. Here's a look at the tower itself: http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&q=48.7125,-94.595&ie=UTF8&ll=48.613853,-94.55497&spn=0.006157,0.01222&z=17 From Wikipedia: "The "Big Bog" is composed mostly of wetlands and is larger than the state of Rhode Island. It is also almost entirely unpopulated, except for the town of Waskish along Highway 72. Waskish consists of about a hundred people who live entirely off pulp-wood sales, a gas station and a bar.
If they take down the tower I will definitely miss the light at the top, as I can see it almost immediately after I leave Waskish, and it stays with me for the next 20 miles. At 2AM that blinking red light is pretty much the only companion on that road, apart from the occasional deer, bear, fox, or the snores of the spouse.
So technically, I suppose I use LORAN-C more than most drivers. :-)
John
LORAN is still around today since its used as a clock to calibrate some old military gear. The fact that it is useful as a backup system when solar flares mess up GPS isn't a major point now that most LORAN gear has been removed, is not longer functional or the operator can't remember how to use it.
According to Wikipedia, Selective Availability of GPS was eliminated in 2000. Currently produced satellites (i.e. launched since 2007) can't implement the feature even if they wanted to.
It's planned but it's behind schedule and over budget. Also, reports in May 2009 are placing expectations that the GPS constellation will fall below 24 satellites with a possibility of loss of accuracy.
Micrometeorite barrage perhaps, but an asteroid attack is very unlikely to succeed without also killing every human on earth.
Ah, yes -- but Loran-C stations are no doubt being phased out due to their comparative vulnerability to raptor attacks. Just ask Randall Munroe!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
... at least, that's what they want you to believe. If you think they can't do it, then you'll rely on that fact. Then when battle time comes and they switch it on, you'll be lost.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The "new" version of DGPS is called WAAS (wide area augmentation system), which is where airports in the US will have local DGPS stations send their correction data to the WAAS satellite, and these corrections will be distributed to aircraft flying over the US for use as precision approaches (instead of the use of radio equipment at the end of runways).
Differential GPS made selective availability useless as a security tool.
No, DGPS is only useful if you have some way of of taking the pseudo-random variable offset recorded by the fixed GPS at the known point and sending it to the GPS you've stuck in the nose of your cruise missile or whatever. SA was a perfectly useful security tool. The real problems with it were twofold: First, the commercial applications for full-accuracy GPS were just too great to keep them locked up. Second, the military had such a difficult time procuring useful GPS units capable of accessing the encrypted full-accuracy signal that they gave up and acknowledged that most ground troops were walking around using commercial GPS rather than than the god-awful issue units and that they might as well have full accuracy.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Just like loran-C vs GPS, maybe you should keep dial-up ISP in case your broadband internet begins to fail?
Yeah, thought so, you don't have a dial-up ISP anymore do you?
Well, I can connect to the internet using my cell phone (PC->bluetooth->phone->UMTS>internet), so I have a backup. I can also try to connect to one of the many WiFi networks around me. If that fails, I still have my dial-up modem, but I don't know if the telephone company still provides dial-up service (it used to provide a dial up service where you just paid for the minute, but no monthly fee). OTOH, if my aDSL connection failed it would probably mean that the dial-up wouldn't work too, because they both go to the same phone company.
Also, I could get a 64/64kbps connection from my cable TV provider if my main connection was not working for a long time.
Exactly.
SA wasn't even used in the gulf war. Its unlikely ever to be used because so much relies on it, and a Euro system or a Russian system would make it pointless.
It was never all that great (the claimed accuracy is optimistic), the receivers are hopelessly expensive and all commercial use has, for all practical purposes, ceased.
Even during SA use periods, GPS tended to be more accurate anyway.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yeah, it'd be a shame if our country couldn't maintain a major component of our transportation network.....
Not comparable. The feds warned them for several years that the bridge was dangerous. Like all of our interstate highway system, maintenance and construction is the responsibility of the states. The bridge in question was the responsibility of the Minnesota DOT. Sure, if you left the GPS constellation in the care of the various states' DOT offices, we'd soon have no GPS... but they ain't fuckin' in charge of it, the Air Force is. The Air Force isn't going to pretend their satellites will magically last forever.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Heck, even most satellites launched these days use GPS instead of doppler and ranging measurements. Not that they ever used LORAN-C, but it ought to demonstrate that nobody believes GPS will be gone any time soon.
Also, if you have some free time, consider asking your congressperson to give the USCG more $$.
Better to ask them why we operate two navies, 1 and a half armies, and 2 3/4 air forces. Our military organization has gotten to its current state through idiotic "fiefdom building" rather than an actual analysis of what we need to conduct military operations efficiently.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
Sure, SA was eliminated. But the US bitched about the Galileo system that the EU is making until they changed the frequency to one that was farther away from what GPS uses. The reason was because if they used the same frequency it would be impossible to jam Galileo without also jamming GPS. The US threatened to launch against Galileo satellites if they didn't change frequencies. The point being, if they were this pissed off about not being able to jam Galileo then they obviously have a way to jam Galileo if they deem it "necessary". It doesn't make sense to jam Galileo and at the same time run GPS at full accuracy, so they obviously also have a way to jam non-military GPS receivers. It might not be called SA anymore, but they have some method of jamming it.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
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.
Well, even the ground (e.g. LORAN) equipment could (would eventually) be fried, so don't you think that only safe fall back technology in navigation is pre-electronic, classic astronomical and geomagnetic one? IMHO, we should use our improved and accumulated knowledge of materials, planet Earth and heavens above to construct better, yet still robust, aids for "passive" navigation.
You know that both GPS and Galileo (and GLONASS for that matter) include quite a bit of redundancy; it's unlikely that a significant portion of the satellites would be affected by any single event. And GPS and Galileo are easily interoperable, so a single receiver can use a combination of the two systems to get a fix even if any one system does not provide enough functional satellites.
I'm not saying it's impossible for the whole shebang to fail, but it's not nearly as likely as you'd like to pretend. Nor is traditional navigation nearly so helpless; it might take a few minutes for an inexperienced navigator to get a fix with astronomical observations, but it only takes 2 pages of cheat sheet, a 4th grade education, and a few minutes to use a sextant.
http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=11335
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.
The airport system is LAAS. WAAS is a general-purpose accuracy improvement system with signals broadcast from geosynchronous satellites. WAAS provides a 95% probability of 25-foot or better accuracy both vertically and laterally (with real-world measurements closer to 5-feet) for any compatible receiver over almost all of North America. It also provides an integrity guard; GPS signals that are out-of-spec can be invalidated in under 10 seconds.
LAAS uses a local VHF link to provide additional accuracy within ~25 miles of a LAAS ground station. It's similar in function to WAAS but uses ground stations exclusively, and is intended primarily for use in aircraft navigation in cat II and cat III approaches.
Well they can simply turn GPS off (entirely or over certain areas) or introduce large-scale errors; since they don't control Galileo that's not an option and jamming is the only solution. And since jamming is not a precision tool it would be nice if jamming operations didn't interfere with the more selective control available for GPS.
They're probably also worried about unintentional interference from Galileo. Or jamming from third parties -- if someone starts jamming radionav systems it would be useful to know if they're targeting the EU or the US.
On the contrary. The GPS constellation consists of fast-orbiting spacecraft. Period is about 11 hours. So all that must happen is an event that lasts 11 hours and has sufficient energy to do the job. The reserve sats (block IIR) orbit at the same rate; they'd be just as fried as the block II and block IIA sats.
For GPS to work, you need a minimum of three working sats within LOS of the antenna; the position fix is determined from the downward intercept of three spheres centered on the sats. Anyone who is depending on this, and suddenly loses it, may be in serious trouble. And it's not all that easy to whip out a sextant in the cockpit of an aircraft, or in your SUV (I'm really not sure how many expeditions actually carry a sextant, for that matter. I don't own one, and I do know how to use one.)
Here, take a look at this charmer, happened only 2 years ago: X-class flare. Pay particular attention to the duration.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
... then they obviously have a way to jam Galileo if they deem it "necessary".
I sure hope us Europeeeens have a similar ability to jam GPS, and the stones to use it, if the US _ever_ jams Galileo!
It'd be better if the US could use it's obvious might more like a big brother and less like a school bully!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
I've never used it on a boat but I went flying with another pilot once who had a LORAN unit installed in a Kitfox. I didn't even know what it was at the time, but as he explained it, it was much cheaper to install than a VOR receiver. We did a fair amount of flying in Florida navigating using that unit.
I know that with the prices of handheld GPS (for aviation, boating, and everything else) coming down a lot of such technologies may be shut off, but it still seems a bit sad to me. I love GPS and it certainly is easier to use, but I'd like to see some of the older technologies maintained at least as backups.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
GPS is nice. Loran is a wonderderful back up. But you just can't beat a sextant and a nautical almanac, either. Just like it's a good idea to learn to add before using a calculator, it's a good idea to have some sort of low tech back up for navigation. You never know when your generator will die, and the batteries in your GPS will leak that same day, leaving you stranded.
If you do any real savings, a sextant (and knowing how to use it!) is a must.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Very close. LAAS (Local Area Augmentation System) is where airports have local DGPS sending the corrections based upon ionospheric disturbances, timing, and satellite orbit errors. The LAAS stations can be used for percision approaches with a lateral error of approximately 1 foot, and a vertical error of approixmtely 25 feet.
WAAS is a series of 25 (approximately) base stations across the country that send the updates. These locations are chosen to ensure complete availability (although there are many places where geography makes it impossible right now). The WAAS correction are within about 3m both vertically and laterally.
$160M over 10 years was just the *updates* being done, that's not the operational budget for USCG operational budget. USCG spends $36M @ year for LORAN. Viewing how large of a job USCG has to do, I think I rather see the man power and $36M put to use for better port security then deal with some old fart in his $3000 boat whining about having to pay for a $99 pocket GPS unit that he will seldom use. LORAN was originally be stopped back in the 1990s, pity it wasn't.
they should at least keep it intact and in good working order and if they ever need it they can just start it back up with little or no effort. thats too much invested to just sell off as junk surplus equipment.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
A beacon based system operating on 100KHz. LORAN A was allowed to die out around 1980. Pairs were decommissioned when one of the stations died. Anyone still using LORAN for nav might still use the LORAN charts. I used to repair aircraft LORAN, EDO 345 and others.
When GPS first came out the receivers where not cheap. Now you are correct they are as cheap as chips.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Actually the process has been going on for a LONG time. Slashdot readers are just finding out about it now because they are not 'in the know', and the DHS likes to play things close to the hip. There is such a thing as For Official Use Only. Just because the tax payers are footing the bill does not mean that they actually have any right to know what is going on in their Coast Guard. Here is the whole story. LORAN has been kept online until now because it provides a cost effective backup to GPS. The entire LORAN constellation can be kept up for much less then the price of 1 satellite, if someone should decide to take it out. GPS can be jammed fairly effectively. There are plenty of plans on the internet to do just that. My favorite one has a GPS jammers attached to a balloon that travels overhead. Thankfully our enemies are not very creative. LORAN uses a 1 MW Medium Frequency transmitters that are much harder (or would require much more power) to jam. The chain is being taken down because, President Obama needs a token cost cutting measure to give to the U.S. public in face of a massive budget increase. I am for saving money, but he is going about it in a misguided manner. The major cost from LORAN is not the equipment. It is the people you have to pay to staff LORAN stations in far off places like Attu. The problem is that he is not getting rid of these people. These people whose sole job is to take care of LORAN are being transfered into other jobs in the Coast Guard where they were not needed before, and are not needed now. There are about 100 individuals. If we could fire these individuals due to needs of the service, we could really save some money.
One hiccup from the sun... or a high-altitude thermonuclear detonation.
GPS is the US DOD network the other networks are owned by other nations and while they are GPS like they have different names.
Second satellites are not very vulnerable. Only a small hand full of nations can attack them and it any of them did things would be very very bad...
Satellites are expensive but that costs is fixed you can not save any money on maintenance by keeping Loran working. So Loran being cheaper to keep in service isn't an issue. Loran recivers are much more expensive.
Yes I actually know a lot about both systems. I can not help it if you confused GLONASS and Galileo with GPS.
Galileo isn't in service yet.
You also have COMPASS from China but that is also not in service yet.
The other systems are not global but regional systems.
BTW the correct generic term is GNSS or Global Navigation Satellite System. GPS is the US DOD funded system... Oh and as for me no know anything about the systems... Not one of my statements where in factual error while in this post several of yours are.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Then I bet you they don't have a Loran receiver. I suggest they spend the $300 or so dollars and pick up backup handheld GPS
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Not all the stations are going offline immediately. The station in Attu will stay online for another 5 months I believe, because they act as secondary chains to the ones in Russia. It is interesting that Russia is keeping their chain online, whereas we are giving up ours. I guess it is just a sign that our empire is in decline. This brings up an interesting question. What happens when we do abandon Attu. Right now there are only 20 people on the whole island. Attu is way outside of TTW. The mineral rights alone might be worth fighting over. I hereby offer my services to the united states to homestead, and create a permanent U.S. presence on the island. Ahh. I come cheap, and do not need all the supplies and logistics that the current Coasties are needing.
I sure hope us Europeeeens have a similar ability to jam GPS, and the stones to use it, if the US _ever_ jams Galileo!
You can jam GPS for roughly $20.00. Ask US pilots who have flow over Iraq during the early part of the war. The Iraqies would jam GPS and light tire fires in hopes of preventing laser locks because of the huge/dense black clouds of smoke. That's the reason some bombs missed their target, causing collateral damage. I guess they forget that most countries can lock via visual tracking, radar, IR, RF, and that jammers can be targeted too.
Jamming localized GPS is well known, cheap, and technically easy.
I hope grandma has the required education to react on situations where intervention is needed...
Technology and robots have been in our lives for some time now; although controlling them is still yet another thing; ....since we don't trust our machines to be our intelligence and life saviors ... or do we ?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
You are watching too many movies, There are no such thing as AI systems and conspiracies ...
Please hold, for the grey goo to do it's work, it won't hurt, I promise!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Is this a first shoot, then ask questions thing?
Since when do risk assessment evaluations happen after taking the risk ?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I remember seeing a derelict Loran-C station in Iceland. I was very excited to see it, but I don't think anyone else in my group had a clue what it was.
...although I can't speak for the accuracy (meaning repeatability).
Repeatability is precision.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Considering most of these articles were on slashdot before, you don't have much of an excuse.
You would do well to do some research.
The US threatened to launch against Galileo satellites if they didn't change frequencies.
No.
The frequency overlap was a separate issue, and it was an issue that had other NATO members concerned as well, not just the US: NATO relies on GPS as well.
The US threatened to shoot down Galileo satellites if that system was used by, for example, China for precision-guided attacks against US forces in some hypothetical future conflict. Since China is, or was, a participant in the Galileo project, that hypothetical scenario was not an academic one.
And the only reason that 'threat' was ever made was because of the initial stance of the Galileo people that they would never turn off the Galileo system even if it was being used for weapons targeting by someone in a war with the US.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-04zc.html
The European delegates reportedly said they would not turn off or jam signals from their satellites, even if they were used in a war with the United States.
A senior European delegate at the London conference said his US counterparts reacted to the EU position "calmly".
"They made it clear that they would attempt what they called reversible action, but, if necessary, they would use irreversible action," the official was quoted as saying.
Seriously, what did you expect us to say? If the tables were turned, what would you do?
Whatever was actually said, the US and Europe came to an agreement over Galileo way back in 2004, so this is all old (and misleading) news...
Better to ask them why we operate two navies, 1 and a half armies, and 2 3/4 air forces.
The fact that you believe they are all just different versions of the 'same thing' tells me you should be asking google, wikipedia, or somebody what those different entities actually *do*. They are each solutions to *different problems*. They each came into being because the other services didn't have, or could not provide, a solution to some new 'problem'.
a) USMC came into existence because the Navy needed soldiers to defend ships, and do amphibious assaults. The Army couldn't do these things, and, understandably, didn't really *want* to.
b) USN Aviation is an extremely specialized form of combat aviation. If you don't see the differences between them, go ask a USAF pilot if he's ever landed a jet on an aircraft carrier. Now guess what dominates the training of USN pilots...
c) USMC Aviation came into being because of the MC's need for extreme/aggressive/close-in air support, since they typically can not rely on heavy artillery support, at least in amphibious assaults. They have historically, and still to a lesser extent today, do things that no other air force will/can do, because helping the grunt on the ground is their only reason for existence.
Go back especially to WWII and look at the operational differences between USMC air groups and USAF air groups. Their formation of 'Air Liaison Parties' to coordinate air support for/with invading troops (and landing with them) was not something the USAAF was doing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Air_Support_Center
Also note that 'b' above applies here too, many USMC combat air groups are also (and need to be) carrier-qualified.
d) USCG != USN. They aren't, and never were, meant to be the same, or even similar. USCG began life as, believe it or not, maritime 'revenue agents', in the Department of *Treasury*, not Defense. Their original job was to catch smugglers. Then they were merged with the 'life-saving service' (which they still excel at) to form the USCG. The USN can't do this, for one thing, the USN has no law-enforcement powers (the USCG is the only military branch that can wield the same authority as a civilian police officer). Also, if you need rescuing from a sinking or sunk ship at sea, the USCG is the better choice, because that is their specialty, and a focus of their training, something that simply does not have the same priority with the USN (and I say that as an ex-USN guy).
On the other hand, the USCG doesn't use any weapons heavier than .50cal MGs & their largest ships are smaller then USN destroyers (and aren't designed for naval combat - their ability to take and survive damage is limited), so if somebody needs their maritime ass kicked, guess who I'm gonna call? You call on the USCG to enforce the law and help save sailors in distress, you call on the USN when a hostile naval force needs an attitude adjustment. See the difference?
e) When you need to drive in a nail, you don't reach for a screwdriver...
One problem in using Loran is that only older craft still have it and few still know how to use it. I'm not sure I could even buy a LORAN-C receiver anymore. The real question is when will they stop putting the LORAN lines on ships charts. Once that happens LORAN is really toast.
Well.. Actually, for the last 30 days or so, the only issues have been SVN24 (PRN24) and SVN57 (PRN29).. No issues with SVN/PRN 25 !
Note that every sat has to be taken down once in a while for diagnostics & such (it is mandated by NAVSTAR).
We've been running on a 32 SVNs schedule since March 23rd.. (that's how much will fit in planes A-F anyway - and how much the GPS system handles).. So GPS has been at max capacity for 10 month !
But it doesn't really matter how many sats you have - as long as your DOP (Dillution Of Precision) is satisfactory for your application.
--Ivan
You're not likely to use one of the cereal box units for navigation except as an extreme emergency backup. The ones you use on ships and aircraft have all sorts of additional useful functions such as programming a course using known navigation points.