Anyone heard about turning LORAN back on in CONUS?

[BillTIZ]

Back when dinosaurs roamed, etc.

We flew with navigators with sextants and Air Almanacs and possibly chicken bones and tea leaves...

But during IMC, the navigators could perform an ARDA (Airborne Radar Directed Approach). The Nav would use the on-board radar to find the runway and give us an ASR type approach. All self contained. Now, this approach would have been a last-ditch effort to try and get the plane down on some concrete, its accuracy was very (VERY) dependent on the skill of the navigator on board, and even with the sharpest navs, it was definitely not what you would call precise by any stretch of the imagination.

BTDT

 

[Morgan3820]

I am intrigued by the part about establishing a worldwide 100 kHz timing signal first using existing government owned radio spectrum, and being able to sell it as a backup source for GPS timing. That could bring in billions of dollars. Would it be profitable? Of course, linking that word and government has a rather poor track record.

The average person has no idea how dependent our society is on the GPS timing signal. It is intertwined with literally everything around us, allowing events timed in nanoseconds to operate in concert.

If it were to fail one day, there would be unbelievable chaos in just about every system and industry. I can't even begin to list the specifics. A data center literally cannot operate without it. Cloud computing systems worldwide would collapse.

Global manufacturing would stop. Stock markets and banking sectors in every country would be unable to function, and every computing system connected to the internet would be affected. In fact, the internet would just quit working.

Before I retired, I was a principal in a general and electrical contracting business which built large data centers. The GPS antenna location, the routes and methods used to bring that signal into the rack space, and the protection and security of the system were extremely critical in even the smallest facilities.

Since I no longer deal with this issue, I wonder to what extent the Russian GLONASS system is being used as a backup timing system in today's world. Would someone in the industry care to share their perspective?

I ask because my cynical side is considering the cost of implementing a new system paid for with deficit spending while GLONASS could be integrated tomorrow.

As for general aviation, if a modernized LORAN system appeared tomorrow, making it work in your airplane would be similar to what the adoption of ADS-B has necessitated. In other words, you would have to shell out an uncomfortably large sum of cash.

You make it sound like it is a bad thing. I don't think that it would be that big if a deal. A disruption certainly but life would go on. So I would have to read a map.

 

[davidgfern]

I have a little handheld Garmin 64s that does both GPS and GLONASS. So after the russians knock out the GPS constellation, I can rely on their system to navigate

The Russians developed a system equivalent to OMEGA (known in the west as ALPHA) that I believe is still in operation (I was able to receive several of these stations at my San Diego location about ten years ago). I imagine that its primary use is for submarines operating in the Arctic.