Loran: What the President Meant to Say Was...

November 11, 2009 By: Don Jewell

Defense PNT Newsletter, November 2009

“What the General meant to say was…” This Henny Youngmanish one-liner has probably been around the military for as long as there have been general officers and those that endeavor to protect them from themselves. I am not picking on generals because certainly we all misspeak from time to time; it is just that generals and presidents do it more often in public forums.

In the case that follows, my Dear Watson, it was the president of the United States who misspoke. Now, bottom line upfront, before irreparable damage is done, it is time for one of his henchmen to standup and have the fortitude to say, “What the president meant to say was…”

I am referring to a speech President Obama made in February 2009 and budget recommendations he made in May 2009 when he referred to military systems that are “obsolete and should be cancelled or terminated” in order to save funding for the military. In the vernacular we call these programs, obsolete or not, bill payers. In this case the president received some bad advice when he referred to Loran-C as one of those programs.

The president stated that “Loran-C, a $35-million program, is a long-range, radio-navigation system [that] has been made obsolete by GPS.” The problem being that this is not the whole story. Loran-C, which stands for LOng RAnge Navigation is indeed a terrestrial long range PNT (positioning, navigation, and timing) system that uses multiple low-frequency radio transmitters (90-100 kHz) and has been around for almost 70 years, and for most of that time was operated by the U.S. Coast Guard. It is certainly in need of a major upgrade and/or modernization, which is and has been in the works for several years. Loran-C will hopefully eventually take the form of a system known as eLoran.

Why am I making an issue of and writing about Loran-C and eLoran in a magazine dedicated to GPS? Good question. And I won’t keep you guessing, here’s the answer: In numerous recent studies it has been unequivocally shown that eLoran or modernized Loran is an excellent back-up and compliment to GPS for positioning, navigation, and timing. This is especially true in the timing arena (remember, 90 percent of GPS users worldwide need GPS for accurate time) where Loran has the equivalent accuracy of the GPS atomic clocks, which is on the order of 1x10-E14.

Why is it so accurate? Because Loran uses atomic clocks as well; they are terrestrial clocks and actually tend to be more accurate and stable than the space-borne GPS atomic clocks. Both private- and government-sponsored studies have show that Loran is a primary back-up for hundreds of major corporations in the United States and around the globe that depend on atomic clock level timing accuracy for their operations, including a majority of telephone and communications companies in countries where the Loran signal is available. And several nations are Loran users in one form or another, including the United States, of course, Japan, Great Britain and several other European countries. Russia uses a nearly identical system in the same frequency range, called CHAYKA.

Worldwide LORAN coverage Pic: Used by permission “kitplane01”
Licensed by Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

The majority of companies today that rely on precise timing at the atomic clock level realize that GPS is the gold standard for time around the world and they use this free service extensively. However, GPS does have limitations in urban canyons, triple-layer jungle canopies, and of course in the areas of jamming or interference. The GPS signals are actually very weak, with a small signal-to-noise ratio (SNR or s/n) especially compared to Loran, but they are also discreet and our GPS receivers do an excellent job picking the GPS signals out of the noise. But a low s/n ratio also makes the GPS signal vulnerable to jamming and interference. Therefore, a backup is needed and Loran has been designated as that backup.

Why, then, would the president want to cancel the Loran system? Also a good question and one that could have several answers, but all of them are based on inaccurate or incomplete information. Now, as sure as I am that our president would never speak off the cuff or without having all the facts, I am just as sanguine that he misspoke concerning Loran or eLoran, possibly due to misinformation supplied by a staff that was just too busy to garner all the facts or, could it be, has another agenda.

There are many who have been busy trying to alert everyone concerning this debacle. The editor-in-chief of GPS World, Alan Cameron, has written extensively about this issue and just last month (October 2009) was awarded the prestigious Presidents Award at the 38th Annual International Loran Association Annual Convention and Technical Symposium in Portland, Maine. The award read:

"Alan Cameron is cited for his continuing dedication to assuring reliable services to the transportation industry. As Editor in Chief of GPS World magazine, Alan Cameron has shown great interest in assuring impartial discussions of GPS vulnerabilities, and highlighting methods of mitigation, including eLoran. He has encouraged accurate and balanced discussion, resulting in widespread knowledge of the availability of low-cost eLoran services. In recognition of his journalistic leadership, his long-term commitment to communicating the need for robust and resilient PNT, and for the insight that he brings to governments, industry and users, the International Loran Association presents: The President’s Award."

Congratulations, Alan, and well deserved.

Meanwhile, the mail I have been receiving on this issue has been substantial. One letter from John Harrington, the director of Business Development at CrossRate Technology, a company heavily involved in the navigation industry, went like this:

Don, your article on GPS 101 is very interesting and highlights some of the issues with our country and the progression of various technologies. The concern regarding misinformed people talking about, reporting on, and making decisions has affected the Loran discussions even more than the GPS discussions. The Loran debate has been plagued by statements by the administration, Department of Homeland Security, and now Congress which are just incorrect.

He went on to include a lengthy excerpt from the Congressional record which I won’t burden you with here, but suffice it to say there are Congressional members, including Senator John McCain, which surprises me, that are just going along with the president because he spoke or misspoke, and now that it is on the record they do not want to buck the system, or they simply do not understand the urgency of the situation.

Another letter expressed dismay over the United States’ seeming indifference to a system that is used globally by 15 nations including the United States:

Don … 14 other nations (besides U.S.) that currently operate eLoran continue to push forward (see a need for robusting GPS and eLoran as a solution), the technology for both UE [user equipment] and transmitters/timers (all dominantly U.S. companies) has moved forward dramatically, increased capability and reduced cost, and yet there appears to be a discontinuity in the U.S. policy. Not only is current apparent policy opposite from the formal U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press release of last year, on which the U.S.’s international partners made funding decisions, but it is at odds with all logic about need and availability of technology.

Another rather lengthy letter came from a very learned and experienced Loran engineer who has been involved in Loran for decades and is known worldwide as an expert; he wondered, Who is in charge of doing the right thing?

Well, if the cost is measured in $10s of billions or more, I think the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would claim he is. But what if the cost is $36 million, who is it then? The choices are: (a) somebody must be, (b) could be almost anybody, or (c) but nobody will step up. In the case of a small but essential service called “enhanced Loran,” abbreviated “eLoran,” I fear the answer is (c).

eLoran is a modern position and timing service, developed and tested over the last twelve years, at a taxpayer cost of $159 million, by the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). eLoran is a 21st-century modernization of the Loran-C system, a long range electronic navigation system, originally designed and deployed by the Navy and USCG in the 1950s for maritime navigation. Loran-C is a much older system, eLoran is a new system based on the modernized Loran-C infrastructure. Loran-C is no longer needed, but eLoran certainly is, and thus the Loran-C infrastructure is needed. The cost to operate and maintain the eLORAN infrastructure within the USCG is $36 million per year. President Obama’s fiscal year 2010 budget, which went into effect October 1, 2009, proposes to allow the USCG to use this $36M for other purposes, effectively requiring termination of the Loran-C system. The USCG takes this action because it believes Loran-C is no longer needed for maritime navigation in an age when the Global Positioning System (GPS) is available worldwide at higher levels of accuracy.

GPS is a great system, but its’ signals are received on the earth with very low power and reception can be easily disrupted — blockage by buildings, mountains, or foliage, or accidental or deliberate interference are the greatest threats. Let us examine the latter. Think about looking at a single candle from across the room — easily seen. However, if that candle is in New York and you are in Los Angeles, and if you could see across the continent, it would appear very dim indeed. Now imagine someone in-between shines a small light in the path — you will never see the candle. GPS signals are the electronic equivalent of that candle, from 11,000 miles in space and almost any interfering signal (in a package as small as a deck of cards) can block GPS reception for miles. In fact, there have been many examples of small TV antennas and other devices, improperly installed, which have blocked GPS reception in entire harbors and nearby towns. In such cases, the best detection technologies took hours to days to identify likely sources within a mile and required manual searches “door-to-door” to finally eliminate the offender.

And it’s not just boats and ships that are affected. GPS is very good, universally available, and now used not only for “safety of life” navigation in aircraft, ships, and boats, but also for synchronizing telephone lines and cellular phones, assuring that ATM transactions are processed securely, tracking “just-in-time” deliveries from overnight letters to truckloads of needed industrial parts. It is also used to for alerting first responders, routing them to emergencies, and tracking them for safety on scene. And finally, it is used for all manner of recreational and quality of life activities, such as hiking and in-car navigation. In short it is ubiquitous.

There was an [GPS jamming] incident in a San Diego harbor in 2007 [reported in GPS World] that disrupted all the above. The interference was unintentional, self-discovered, and corrected within a few hours. It impacted 100 square miles. An after-the-fact assessment calculated the likely location of the source; this took 36 hours and had a 1-mile uncertainty factor, and would have focused the “door-to-door” search on Coronado Island. Imagine how long it would have taken investigators to cross the bridge to the mainland to find the actual source. This was but a single source, non-deceptive, in a fixed location; imagine if there were multiple sources, deliberately turning on and off and moving about randomly. They could have disrupted the entire area for weeks and they might never have been located.

Enter eLoran. The USCG and FAA very carefully designed eLoran to serve as an independent backup to GPS for just such cases. It is not as accurate as GPS, but accurate enough to guide ships safely to port or airplanes to land, provide time and frequency for communications networks, provide first responder services, and enable reliable tracking of just-in-time deliveries. It was purposely designed to be integrated in the receiver with GPS for seamless operation through momentary and extended outages of GPS. So, eLoran is a single, relatively inexpensive national backup capability for all users of position, navigation, precise time, or accurate frequency from GPS for safety-of-life navigation, critical national infrastructure, and other essential services.

In February 2009, President Obama announced his first budget for fiscal year 2010, and in it, he announced that Loran-C would be discontinued and dismantled … as obsolete. Since the Loran-C infrastructure had already been upgraded with $159M of taxpayer investment to serve as the base for eLoran, this effectively countered the decision announced by DHS in February 2008. Today, the Congress mulls over this budget, but the sad fact is if the budget stands, for want of $36M, the nation will lose its only national backup capability and be at risk of much more should a determined adversary disrupt GPS for an extended period. For want of someone, anyone, to stand up and be accountable for $36M in the budget, we stand to lose an essential national capability. Oh, to be a $100B banking bail out, or a multi-trillion dollar health care initiative — at least then, someone in this Administration would care!

The engineer/historian who wrote this letter, and desires to remain anonymous, did a great job in explaining the situation and it is indeed a sad fact that since it is such a small amount of funding, it is hard to get someone’s attention. But there is more to the story and all the information is available in the public domain, if you know where to look and apply a little ingenuity.

As Paul Harvey says, the rest of the story is that as the letter above illustrates the Loran-C infrastructure is needed. Loran towers are huge and the infrastructure of the vacuum tube and analog technology they transmit require large buildings to house the mechanicals and usually a substantial workshop on site and a bevy of mechanics to maintain them. Like GPS satellites, Loran ground stations typically have an “A” and “B” side or primary and secondary transmitter. They can be switched in case of a failure or maintenance issues, but it is a long and laborious process. The point being that the land, buildings, power, heat, living quarters, emergency backups, certifications and licensing required for Loran-C will also apply to eLoran, but eLoran is a modern digital system that requires much less care and feeding, but still requires some infrastructure and of course certifications and licensing.

Concluding Thoughts

Years ago, after retiring from the military, I worked for a large — indeed, one of the largest — communications companies on the planet. Within that company there were a group of individuals whose sole purpose in life was to find sites and develop infrastructure for mobile communications towers and cellular towers. They had to find the right location, buy or lease the land, run electricity, gas, water, and waste lines to the larger sites and arrange for emergency backup systems, generators, etc., and then arrange for someone to be available to maintain the site and fix any problems that might arise. It is a daunting task. The Loran-C sites already have this infrastructure in place and, in fact, for eLoran it may all be a bit of overkill, but at least it exists. All this is to say that the rest of the story is that it will be a very expensive process to decommission all the Loran-C sites. So while the president and his budget office are saying we can save $36 million per year by decommissioning Loran-C, they are not telling you about the $150-$200 million required for decommissioning, and that is a conservative estimate. If environmental surveys have to be accomplished, and if there have been any old fuel or chemical spills in the last 50 years, the costs could skyrocket. By some experts' estimates, $500 million is not an unreasonable figure by the time all the sites are decommissioned and reclaimed.

The bottom line is the president and some congressmen and women, not all of course, want the USCG to dismantle a critical part of our national security infrastructure, and abandon an eLoran modernization plan that is more than 50% complete, at a cost of $159 million over 10 years, so we can save $36 million a year, but we will have to spend from $150-$500 million to totally dismantle the system over the next few years.

The alternatives are many and desirable. Let’s not forget that there are still many ships and some aircraft, especially general aviation aircraft, that still use Loran and would upgrade to eLoran receivers, as long as they knew the system was viable and would remain in operation. There are hundreds of ships around the globe that still rely on Loran-C and would use eLoran as a primary or back-up PNT system.

And as for our warfighters, eLoran receivers are getting smaller every day and soon they will be able to be incorporated into GPS receivers as a complement to and a backup for GPS. And Loran signals are much stronger than GPS signals. Loran signals penetrate buildings, triple jungle canopies, are available in urban and natural canyons, and as I said before the timing signal is just as accurate. Indeed, I have always considered that part of the all-signals-available requirement for the Perfect Handheld GPS Transceiver (PHGPST) would include Loran or eLoran as a primary signal. So to me it is clear, we need the Loran-C infrastructure for eLoran and we need eLoran as part of our critical national security infrastructure and as a complement to and backup for GPS. Plus if I were a terrorist and trying to figure out ways to take out or jam GPS signals, I would be daunted by the fact that a complementary and back-up terrestrial system existed that would be almost impossible to jam. So eLoran would also serve the purpose as an anti-terrorism capability. It would really be sad to lose all this capability because no one bothered to check the facts before advising the president.

But the real sad part of this story is that no one is willing to tell the president he misspoke, or simply stand-up and say, "What the president meant to say was..."

Until next time, happy navigating.

Don

For further perspective on this issue, read Alan Cameron's editorial, "President, Congress Abandon National Infrastructure."