[time-nuts] Loran in the US
Greg Broburg
semiflex at comcast.net
Mon Mar 5 17:05:01 UTC 2012
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.
>
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