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

[John Day]

I do know that at one stage during the late 80's Loran-C gear became 
very well priced compared to the then emerging and expensive GPS 
gear, so many sailors bought them. I would not be surprised if a lot 
of coastal sailing was done with Loran in the navigators station and 
GPS in the hand in the cockpit.

John



At 03:45 PM 4/20/2006, you wrote:
>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
>
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