[time-nuts] Loran - any good for timekeeping?

[bg at lysator.liu.se]

On Fri, April 21, 2006 19:53, John Ackermann N8UR said:

> Loran can do great frequency measurement -- almost as good as GPS.  But
> for timing, it's not so hot.  The problem with current Loran is that it
> doesn't carry a timecode, or mark the second epoch.

> It's possible to
> recover 1pps from Loran with a bit of work (the Austron 2100T receiver
> can do this) but it's not a trivial task, and in any event you need
> something else to disambiguate the seconds.

There seems to be work ongoing to fix that. No idea of the current status.

Page 6 in [1] suggests UTC broadcast is coming to Loran.

And from the now obsolete(?) www.nels.org site.

"Reelektronika is also developing a wide-area UTC (universal time
co-ordinate) service, which brings accurate time to users who are in range
of a Eurofix station. All four Eurofix stations in NELS will be equipped
with this service, which then covers about 240 million Europeans in
Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, Benelux and the UK. In addition,
Reelektronika is developing UTC user receivers that will provide accurate
UTC all over the NELS coverage area taking into account the propagation
path delay between the provider station and the user. The receivers will
have Stratum 1 performance and the timing accuracy will be better than 1
μsec. The UTC service will be installed at the four Eurofix sites
early March. The timing receivers will be developed based on the
miniaturised integrated Loran-C/GNSS receiver design and delivery date for
the receivers is scheduled to July 2004."

[1]
http://www.reelektronika.nl/Loradd/Downloads/reelektronika_LORADD_Manual_v1.01.pdf


--

 Björn