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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.
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That is correct. And on top of that, recent satellites no longer have the technical capability to implement selective availability anyway (see http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=11335). It is no longer needed for anything after having been turned off several years ago. That's because civilian users had developed multiple techniques - e.g. differential GPS - to get better accuracy even when back SA was still on. In short, SA is dead and buried forever.
Linux user since early January 1992.
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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SA made GPS accurate to 10m.. With the "SA" feature disabled, you're down to 2m... And with Satelite enhancements, it's more like 20cm !
But that's irrelevant.. Because SA was intended to disable any enemy force from using GPS for accurate positioning - until they realized D-GPS (Differential GPS) made the whole point moot (you take a reference point - you send the signal to the receiver - And therefore - the receiver can deduce the SA introduced clock error - because now you have a ref point .. And believe it or not - it is a United Stated Uniform service - the US Coast Gard - that came up with it to overcome the artificially introduced uncertainty).
However, the military still keep exclusive use of the 1Mhz band (with the 10Mhz being public) - for the only purpose of being able to make real time measurements on tropospheric distortions - so - what happens - is that the military can make 1m accurate reading WITHOUT sat aids.
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.
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.
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
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.
Sailors, I guess.
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
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.
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.
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
...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
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.
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.
>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
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.
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.
Hmm, up here on the Great Lakes we operate 1000ft ships.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_freighter#List_of_1000-footers_on_the_Lakes
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.
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.
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.
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.
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