[time-nuts] Loran C shutdown

[Joe Geller]

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