[time-nuts] Loran C shutdown

Eric Garner garnere at gmail.com
Mon Nov 16 16:44:21 UTC 2009


Does anyone know if there is any organized attempt to save LORAN?

-Eric

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Joe Geller <joegeller at roadrunner.com> wrote:
> The Coast Guard has always been stretched very thin with limited resources
> for many missions.  The saying was, every year we do more and more with less and less.
> I served in the late 70s as an electronics technician, EE, and later after Navy
> flight school, flying air rescue into the 80s.
>
> I was lucky to spend some time at two of the research labs, the electronics
> engineering center (EECEN) in Wildwood, NJ and later the electrical engineering laboratory (EELAB) in
> Alexandria, VA.  At EELAB, I worked in other areas, but a lot of the LORAN work
> was done there.  I remember, even back then, that some of the LORAN guys
> were searching hobby electronics suppliers to find obsolete chips they needed to keep the
> LORAN system going. I think those were LORAN C boards too, although not sure.
> Some new LORAN boards were being developed at the next bench over that used 6502
> micros (I got to go to the micro class with the LORAN guys).
>
> Flying HU-25A Falcon jets (modified Falcon 200s that we got in 1982) across the Gulf of Mexico for
> some years, we had a gyro inertial system (which took some 20 minutes to align), LORAN C,
> and all the standard aviation navigation gear, ADF, VOR, DME, and TACAN.  The
> Collins “RNAV” system used all inputs to develop position information.  As I recall,
> once we got hundreds of miles out into the gulf, all we had left was the inertial system
> (and paper charts and aluminum slide rules and later my hp-41CV with nav
> equations, when the RNAV when out).  What we would have given for a GPS!
>
> Oh well, at least on the bright side, maybe some of those hp clocks will start to
> show up on the surplus market.
>
> There is a picture of the Falcon at:
> http://www.aero-web.org/database/aircraft/getimage.htm?id=15047
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-- 
--Eric
_________________________________________
Eric Garner



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