[time-nuts] The Demise of LORAN (was Re: Reference oscillator accuracy)

Francesco Ledda frledda at verizon.net
Sun Nov 15 15:37:51 UTC 2009


The bottom line is simple: the military don't need it, the FAA see no value
in it; the avionics industry has discontinued the manufacturing of LORAN
receivers years ago, the General Aviation community has bigger fish to fry
(fight user fees); the Europen talked in the past about using LORAN for
redundancy purposes, but never issued any concrete plans or requisitions.

For all above reasons, LORAN is going to go.

As a pilot, my personal experience about LORAN is mixed. Two times in heavy
IMC, using RNAV LORAN, the LORAN went out in crytical phases of flight. This
has never happened to me, with GPS.



-----Original Message-----
From: time-nuts-bounces at febo.com [mailto:time-nuts-bounces at febo.com]On
Behalf Of Magnus Danielson
Sent: Sunday, November 15, 2009 9:01 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] The Demise of LORAN (was Re: Reference
oscillator accuracy)


bg at lysator.liu.se wrote:
> John,
>
>> If a LORAN transmitter were destroyed by a terrorist team, a backup could
>> be in operation in hours. A damaged GPS system could easily take many
>> months or even years to fix.
>>
>> -John
>
> A LORAN site, with a several hundred meter high mast, a small house full
> of transmitter, signal generation and Cs clock(s?)... on a remote
> Norwegian island... would not be back online within a few hours after an
> attack.

Regardless of location, it will take some time to restore functionality.
About a year maybe.

The LORAN-C station would reduce navigation in a certain area. However,
since most "interesting" targets use GPS, it is a more interesting target.

> GPS is supposed to work without _any_ terrestrial support for days or
> weeks. I doubt that anyone can get something lethal for the SVs up in
> orbit without making it very obvious who they are. GPS now has lots of hot
> spare birds in orbit, that a instantly online with one or a few satellites
> going bust.

The AutoNAV feature should keep it up for 180 days. It has never been
used. Essentially, what if you wipe out the ground segment and needs to
rebuild it. The ground segment points of GPS is fewer than the LORAN-C
stations.

Firing rockets to down the birds is above the average terrorist budget
and infrastructure. While not all 30 GPS birds needs to go down, a
significant number of them needs to for a significant system impact.
Downing a single of them is sufficient for the political effect, so that
is more likely.

Using jammers is far more likely. It has been analyzed quite deeply.

It is not impossible to locate a GPS jammer. In Iraq, they had relative
high power jammers and they where able to locate them and finally take
them out.

> That said, I think LORAN should be kept running as a backup, also with a
> firm commitment that it WILL KEEP running for 10+ years, giving vendors a
> reason to develop modern receivers.

The electronics needed to support LORAN-C and eLORAN is not very complex
by todays measure. Could be integrated with a GPS receiver.

Cheers,
Magnus

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