LORAN likely to make a comeback

cowman said:
So what will the new receivers cost? If it's something basic without a large display maybe $2-5k and if they're full blown navigators then what... $5-10k?

I may be off but, especially if you already have GPS who would drop a significant amount of money to add this to their panel?
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They won't be a separate box they will be another input source to your gps/glonass/loran RNAV box. Think upgrade to your Garmin waas box


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Stupid question. I have a LORAN in my plane that I haven't turned on in years. If eLORAN does get enabled, will my receiver work with it or would I need a new one? Just wondering if it may be worth saving with future panel changes...
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
We can be confident that the technology will be updated just enough that your old LORAN hardware won't work.
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This is eLORAN, not LORAN-C as others have already pointed out.

cowman said:
So what will the new receivers cost? If it's something basic without a large display maybe $2-5k and if they're full blown navigators then what... $5-10k?

I may be off but, especially if you already have GPS who would drop a significant amount of money to add this to their panel?
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Anyone who wants it. :) Due to needing the right antenna, these would hit the maritime market at much lower prices at first as separate units. Super easy to install as a backup on ships. The article mentions the GPS jamming problem hits harbors already more often than aviation.

neilw2 said:
Stupid question. I have a LORAN in my plane that I haven't turned on in years. If eLORAN does get enabled, will my receiver work with it or would I need a new one? Just wondering if it may be worth saving with future panel changes...
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Probably not.

Keep in mind this thing will probably die in the Senate unless there's enough paranoia about GPS jamming in military circles and the lobbyists have paid enough money to buy a few Senators and slide it through as a rider.

The manufacturers would certainly make only military versions at 10x COGS for a while, before magically lowering prices to entice the high end civilian market, and then lowering them again years later to vacuum up the low end market.

By then, it'd just be another receiver inside the RNAV "box".
 
cowman said:
So what will the new receivers cost? If it's something basic without a large display maybe $2-5k and if they're full blown navigators then what... $5-10k?

I may be off but, especially if you already have GPS who would drop a significant amount of money to add this to their panel?
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The powers that be are looking for an alternative that is not space-based, uses drastically different frequencies, and cannot be jammed globally. Keep in mind that the signal from a GPS satellite is very, very weak while a loran transmitter's power is measured in megawatts and does not have to travel through 22000 miles of space to reach the earth. FreeFlight, which used to be Trimble, developed a combo GPS/LORAN unit and flight tested it for accuracy. Flight tracks using each technology were virtually identical.

Bob
 
Heck.... INS/IRS. The only completely internal electronic nav systems.
 
neilw2 said:
Stupid question. I have a LORAN in my plane that I haven't turned on in years. If eLORAN does get enabled, will my receiver work with it or would I need a new one? Just wondering if it may be worth saving with future panel changes...
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Not heavy enough to use as an anchor. Paperweight?

Bob
 
teejayevans said:
Can you jam Loran as well?
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A qualified no. eLoran is a global system, with transmitters located all over the world. Never say never, but it is hard for me to imagine a means of jamming all of them with an earth-based system.

Bob
 
Kritchlow said:
Heck.... INS/IRS. The only completely internal electronic nav systems.
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Which is why the military isn't particularly concerned about the loss of GPS. Lose the satellites, fall back on TACAN. Lose that and fall back on Doppler/laser INS systems. Lose that and go with a non jammable paper map. Even tactical ATC / GCI systems will be in place when all those things fail. JDAMs will be backed up with "beam rider" and visual non precision munitions. Backups to your backups.
 
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bobmrg said:
The powers that be are looking for an alternative that is not space-based, uses drastically different frequencies, and cannot be jammed globally. Keep in mind that the signal from a GPS satellite is very, very weak while a loran transmitter's power is measured in megawatts and does not have to travel through 22000 miles of space to reach the earth. FreeFlight, which used to be Trimble, developed a combo GPS/LORAN unit and flight tested it for accuracy. Flight tracks using each technology were virtually identical.

Bob
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Change 22000 miles to km and I think that is more correct. Over-simplifying, eLORAN is essentially a ground-based GPS on another frequency, mathematically speaking. Instead of position based on time differences from the transmissions of master-slave stations, a distance from a reference point (station) is measured by the time to receive a transmitted signal.
 
Will this be accurate enough for GPS-like approaches?

'cause if so, it'd be nice to ignore the whole GPS availability/ RAIM / NOTAM / military screwing with GPS over hundreds of square miles stuff.

(I know it doesn't have altitude information, but still..)
 
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Mistake Not... said:
Will this be accurate enough for GPS-like approaches?

'cause if so, it'd be nice to ignore the whole GPS availability/ RAIM / NOTAM / military screwing with GPS over hundreds of square miles stuff.

(I know it doesn't have altitude information, but still..)
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They'll just mess with eLoran the same way . . .
 
Kritchlow said:
Heck.... INS/IRS. The only completely internal electronic nav systems.
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I've often wondered why that tech hasn't "trickled down" much into lower end applications. The laser based stuff is super cheap to build now.

Velocity173 said:
Which is why the military isn't particularly concerned about the loss GPS. Lose the satellites, fall back on TACAN. Lose that and fall back on Doppler/laser INS systems. Lose that and go with a non jammable paper map. Even tactical ATC / GCI systems will be in place when all those things fail. JDAMs will be backed up with "beam rider" and visual non precision munitions. Backups to your backups.
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That's why I think this isn't primarily for aviation. It's for commercial shipping and magenta line nav systems aboard them. USN may also have an interest.
 
AKBill said:
Something more to waste money and resources on because of the threat of terrorism. It's to bad the human race can't just get along and play nice.
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Or learn that the threat of terrorism is rather small and not generally worth the worry and money we spend on it.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
Change 22000 miles to km and I think that is more correct. Over-simplifying, eLORAN is essentially a ground-based GPS on another frequency, mathematically speaking. Instead of position based on time differences from the transmissions of master-slave stations, a distance from a reference point (station) is measured by the time to receive a transmitted signal.
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Nope, about 22,000 miles is correct.
 
bobmrg said:
The powers that be are looking for an alternative that is not space-based, uses drastically different frequencies, and cannot be jammed globally.
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Here is a wild idea. It may be far fetched, but take a minute to think about it before you denounce it as crazy.

What about if they install devices at airports that use some form of RAdio Detection And Ranging - essentially send out a radio signal and see how long it takes for an echo to return and what direction it returns from? I'm willing to bet that a system like that could be used to vector aircraft along routes to and from airports all across the country! Pretty tough to spoof, but local areas could be jammed.

PeterNSteinmetz said:
Or learn that the threat of terrorism is rather small and not generally worth the worry and money we spend on it.
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That is heresy and is punishable by excommunication. You have been warned.
 
Van Johnston said:
Nope, about 22,000 miles is correct.
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Considering that 22,000 miles is close to geosynchronous orbit above the surface, they don't sit that high as Clark1961 is alluding. Maybe the WAAS satellites are up that high, but not the rest of them.
 
oh good, my snj-5 still has the old northstar still on
 
cowman said:
I may be off but, especially if you already have GPS who would drop a significant amount of money to add this to their panel?
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Anybody who has to complete an important mission even in the presence of jamming. Military and cargo ships, I'd say. Maybe airliners.

Not small GA planes.

I wouldn't pay more for it. If my GPS is jammed I'll just stay home. My mission is not that critical. Or maybe I would navigate by VOR, pilotage, or dead reckoning.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
Considering that 22,000 miles is close to geosynchronous orbit above the surface, they don't sit that high as Clark1961 is alluding. Maybe the WAAS satellites are up that high, but not the rest of them.
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Yes, I had GEO on the brain. My mistake.
 
My NorthStar Loran never, ever failed to display a NAV solution (until the signal was shut down). GPS, not so much...
 
Ever think about the problems inherent with using a folded paper map in a plane traveling at 600+ kts?
Not a real practical solution.
Electronic navigation is the only answer, and it needs to be rock solid.
 
Shepherd said:
Ever think about the problems inherent with using a folded paper map in a plane traveling at 600+ kts?
Not a real practical solution.
Electronic navigation is the only answer, and it needs to be rock solid.
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For approaches?? Good question. Not sure what they have in development, but certainly at this point IRS doesn't cut the mustard for a precision approach.
 
Why make life so complicated?
We have radio stations all over the globe. You just need to update the exact GPS positions of each one; then use multiple stations to find your position. This would be a lot harder to jam, you are talking about a huge frequency range. Just leaves the issue of over the ocean, really far from land.

Tim
 
SCCutler said:
My NorthStar Loran never, ever failed to display a NAV solution (until the signal was shut down). GPS, not so much...
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I had a Northstar Loran give me a 60 mile position error once! :eek:
 
Shepherd said:
Ever think about the problems inherent with using a folded paper map in a plane traveling at 600+ kts?
Not a real practical solution.
Electronic navigation is the only answer, and it needs to be rock solid.
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I'm talking wartime scenario here and not a temporary terrorist act. When all else has failed you revert back to flight school 101.

Obviously electronic NAV is primary but everything external can either be jammed or the physical transmitter elimated. When that happens, INS with paper or even IPad backup. Like the F-111s in Lybia in '86; INS. And like I said, in wartime, there should be enough military ATC / GCI / AWACS in the area to assist as well.

Now, would eLORAN be a nice to have for military aircraft today? Yep, but ILS would have been nice for aircraft like the F-18, F-14, AH-64, OH-58, etc., back in the day as well. DOD decided it wasn't worth the added cost and TACAN/NDB or PAR were sufficient for their purposes. Which is what eLORAN will boil down to. Can it be implemented cheaply into existing avionics and is it an invaluable backup to existing INS/TACAN/GPS systems? I'm not a bean counter but I don't think DOD will be jumping through hoops to get their aircraft equipped. They already have their plate full in getting their aircraft equipped for ADS-B out.
 
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Doggtyred said:
And that was a problem for exactly 1 airframe at that moment, not the total population of aircraft in the service area of those transmitters.
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And early gps was dodgy too. The new receivers will have little in common with the one you had trouble with, and loran frequencies I don't believe make the problem you had particularly more likely.


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tspear said:
Will be interesting to see how they solve the altitude issue.
I wonder why they do not go further, and plan on using all three GPS satellites, US, EU, and Russian. It is three separate frequencies.

Tim
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Technically true, but not really. GPS and Galileo are both centered on 1575.42 MHz. GLONASS is slightly higher at 1602 MHz. They can all use the same antenna, and any jammer would actually be hard pressed NOT to jam them all at the same time.

Funny that this comes up. Can't remember which thread it was, but I had noted, along with others, that having a ground-based backup to satnav is an excellent idea. This would give us the opportunity to have something much more sophisticated than VORs, cheaper to install and maintain, and much more functional.
 
arnoha said:
Technically true, but not really. GPS and Galileo are both centered on 1575.42 MHz. GLONASS is slightly higher at 1602 MHz. They can all use the same antenna, and any jammer would actually be hard pressed NOT to jam them all at the same time.

Funny that this comes up. Can't remember which thread it was, but I had noted, along with others, that having a ground-based backup to satnav is an excellent idea. This would give us the opportunity to have something much more sophisticated than VORs, cheaper to install and maintain, and much more functional.
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Ok, I read http://www.navipedia.net/index.php/GNSS_signal
As three bands. But would you care to translate the gibberish in the link above into 5th grade English? :D

I still am curious, why they just do not use radio and TV stations for the signal points.

Tim
 
tspear said:
I still am curious, why they just do not use radio and TV stations for the signal points.

Tim
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LORAN relies on synchronized transmissions from the different stations. I would also think radio frequency interference at altitude could be an issue. Probably lots of other reasons.
 
tspear said:
Ok, I read http://www.navipedia.net/index.php/GNSS_signal
As three bands. But would you care to translate the gibberish in the link above into 5th grade English? :D

I still am curious, why they just do not use radio and TV stations for the signal points.

Tim
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Basically, all three systems use the same "band". "Band" is a broad term that basically means a range of frequencies that have roughly the same sort of physical properties. It's really arbitrary what is a "band", since the reality is that the spectrum is continuous and the physical properties change smoothly through the range. It's kinda like how there's in a rainbow is a continuous span of color, but we give bands of the rainbow color names. Same thing in the radio spectrum. The satnav band is usually called L-band, which is in the microwave region. For civilian use, only the high L-band signals matter. All the low L-band signals are military. For reference, most cell phones are around 1900 MHz, so that's also in a similar band.

The US system picked what it did because it had the right physical properties: Small antenna size, good weather penetration, reasonable building penetration, low background noise, low power requirement for both receivers and transmitters, sufficient bandwidth. Also, it was a globally available frequency at the time. The Euro system was picked in exactly the same region to be able to share hardware. The Russian system was selected to be in roughly the same region because of the physical properties, but slightly offset so that a sophisticated jammer could jam one but not the other. As it happens, it's close enough that the same antennas can work just fine.

And, yeah, as @denverpilot noted, NDBs and AM radio stations work the same and most ADFs could receive AM radio stations and find them. They weren't officially used due to certification and testing. There was a huge framework run by the FAA ensuring that the NDBs did what they needed to do. No such certification and testing was available for the privately owned commercial transmitters.
 
Van Johnston said:
LORAN relies on synchronized transmissions from the different stations. I would also think radio frequency interference at altitude could be an issue. Probably lots of other reasons.
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Sure, using the Loran system. But if the point is a fail over for GPS, use simple geometry and multiple stations. Much cheaper, no fixed stations to maintain, just a database of known transmitters and the associated GPS coordinates.

Tim
 
tspear said:
Sure, using the Loran system. But if the point is a fail over for GPS, use simple geometry and multiple stations. Much cheaper, no fixed stations to maintain, just a database of known transmitters and the associated GPS coordinates.

Tim
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o_O
 
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