[time-nuts] time-nuts Digest, Vol 21, Issue 22

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <16160.1145561192 at critter.freebsd.dk>
            "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> writes:
: In message <7.0.1.0.0.20060420152108.03151988 at wordsnimages.com>, John Day write
: s:
: >So Loran isn't really dead yet!
: 
: Not quite.
: 
: The draft European Radio Navigation plan shows that Loran-C gives
: 22% of the benefit for 7% of the money.
: 
: But who knows if that translates to political decisions in its favour.

The US is keeping Loran-C going as a backup for GPS as well.  Its been
recently expanded to have data embedded in the pulse streams so that
messages about things like leap seconds and GPS issues can be
disseminated.  A few years ago they upgraded their transmitters and
the savings in electricity from old tube transmitters to new solid
state ones paid for the upgrade.  They upgraded the entire US/Canada
system, except for the chains that extend into Russia.  The new data
channel is being rolled out as well.

One of the interesting things about working on Loran-C was learning
that no one really knows how many current, real users of Loran-C there
are.  Millions of receivers have been sold, but there's evidentially
no good estimates of the number of users (at least there weren't a few
years ago).

Warner