[time-nuts] The Demise of LORAN (was Re: Referenceoscillatoraccuracy)

phil fortime at bellsouth.net
Sun Nov 15 23:36:17 UTC 2009


Didier Juges wrote:
> Enough for what? To bug the heck out of a citizen suddenly unable to find 
> his way to the movie theater?
>
> Weapon systems and aircraft navigation are unlikely to be affected by such 
> a simple device on the ground, even if deployed in large quantity. Most of 
> the stuff that really needs GPS has decent antennas that look up, not 
> down.

They are affected, it is well covered, but the difference is the distance 
from the jammer until affected. It's a fairly well-understood problem and 
the difference between civilian and military receivers lies in signals, 
keying for access, bootstrapping and testing and counter-measures such as 
IMU.

Cheers,
Magnus


Possibly the two largest threats are being overlooked in this discussion. 
The US, Russia, and now China has numerous, possibly in the hundreds of 
clandestine truck sized satellites. Allot thought to weigh in at 8 to 10 
thousand pounds and some such as launched by the space shuttle to weigh in 
at 50,000 pounds up there now. Are they for communications, super-duper 
eyeballs, overgrown pea-shooters/laser guns, jammers, another positioning 
technology, or all of the above? Perhaps the ability to take out the various 
gps and other satellite systems exists now with the push of a button.

Should systems go down under those circumstances, finding the nearest 
Starbucks using gps may be the least of our worries.

Second and perhaps the real threat is a series of unprecedented solar storms 
or other unknown space based threats. That could conceivably render most of 
the satellites useless. I would think that ground based backup of all 
satellite systems would be mandatory.

Phil




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