[time-nuts] Loran in the US

[Greg Broburg]

  A woman is waiting outside of the operating room for news of her 
husbands fate. After some hours of waiting a physician comes to her and 
in a soft voice gives her the news that he has passed. The situation at 
hand was that the paperwork was beyond the operating teams capabilities.

We will learn, I hope sometime in the near future, what the written 
permissions will be for this Loran experiment. My bet is that there is a 
desire for backup precision marine navigation around port cities where 
LightSquared will find most of its customers. This implies LightSquareds 
financial and political base are a force to discard GPS performance in 
these ports. So it would seem to me that the Coast Guard sees the 
investment as a necessary retrenchment to their original move to abandon 
Loran to the FAA many years ago.

Greg


On 3/5/2012 8:37 AM, Jim Lux wrote:
> On 3/5/12 6:19 AM, Charles P. Steinmetz wrote:
>> Poul-Henning wrote:
>>
>>> Thats why some people in the military is looking into a modern
>>> more lightweight version of "Tactical Loran" for use when GPS is 
>>> jammed.
>>
>> That is a much easier thing -- our military/intelligence complex
>> (however oxymoronic that notion is) tries very hard to keep its
>> engagements well away from US soil, so (i) no regulatory approval is
>> required
>
> As someone who deals with non-FCC regulatory approval on a fairly 
> frequent basis, I can tell you it's not quite that simple.  If you're 
> the US government, you're regulated by NTIA, which works much like FCC 
> for licensing.  You have to tell where and when and what sort of 
> emissions, where and when and what sort of receivers, get permission, 
> etc.
>
> And if you're planning on operating outside the US, that gets 
> coordinated via some ITU process.
>
> This is a HUGE problem for the plethora of colleges, businesses, and 
> government labs and research institutions jumping on the nanosat and 
> cubesat bandwagon. Their operations don't really fit within the 
> "amateur radio" bucket, where licensing is fairly easy.
>
>  and (ii) the geographic area of the operating theater is
>> usually far smaller than the size of the US. So, we may very well see
>> the development of mobile beacons for military deployment in hostile
>> areas, but I very much doubt that we will ever see another terrestrial
>> beacon system in the US.
>>
>
> Perhaps not a unified one, but I can see a variety of proprietary or 
> private locating networks being set up.  Surveyors already have high 
> accuracy reference networks.  Some are state run, but others are run 
> by consortiums or private parties.  20 years ago, you used to be able 
> to subscribe to a private service that would give you differential 
> corrections for GPS via a FM broadcast subcarrier or pager.
>