eLoran and GPS

[Bullshooter]

I am posting to ask a question about a book I have read. I will attach a page that describes the eLoran system and suggests that since GPS can be compromised by bad actors, sunspots, and possible other factors, a hybrid Loran/GPS system has been sought by the U.S. Government to have a fallback in case GPS fails.

The book, Navigation Through the Ages, was published in 2009, so 15 years ago. I have not heard anything about such a hybrid system. For all I know it is currently in use and commercially available. As a matter of curiosity, can anyone comment on whether there has been further development, or discarding of this idea?

The attachment does a better job of describing this issue than I did.

BSer

[requiem]

So far as I'm aware there hasn't been much progress made. By the time there is progress, we'll likely all have ring laser gyros in our cell phones along with neutrino detectors.

[Jammer]

The eLoran discussions have gone next to nowhere. Most of the money and concern around GPS alternatives is for time synchronization uses, not navigation. Many people are unaware that some telecommunications and power distribution systems depend upon accurate (on the order of milliseconds) time synchronization between locations.


There is no Loran-like wide-area alternative to GPS under serious consideration at this point, but there are some metropolitan-scale experimental projects using the 900 MHz band out there.

[AA3JY]

“The U.S. Government has long been aware of GPS’s shortcomings, and in recent years various government branches have pushed for a re-appraisal of eLORAN.

As early as 2008, during the end of the Bush Administration, a press release was issued reporting the development of eLORAN as a supplemental navaid. Unfortunately, the recession hit, and nothing materialized until LORAN-C, and LORAN in general, were decommissioned in 2009.

However, discussions of eLORAN didn’t cease, and it was only a few years later when President Obama switched back to support LORAN, signing the Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2015 near the end of his presidency. The Act advocated for working with public and private entities to develop, “a positioning, navigation and timing system to provide redundant capability in the event Global Positioning System signals are disrupted, which may consist of an enhanced LORAN system.”

More recently, President Trump signed the National Timing Resilience and Security Act of 2018, which called on the Department of Transportation to reduce our critical dependency on GPS, propose an implementation plan to make America less dependent on GPS within the next two years and discuss creating possible eLORAN facilities.

Sadly, as of now, there’s still no news as to the development or completion of this plan.”