RTCM Asserts Loran Key to Navigation and GPS

December 4, 2009

The Radio Technical Commission for Maritime Services on December 2 sent the following letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and the head of the U.S. Coast Guard in support of the Loran service.

The letter strongly supports completion and operation of the North American Enhanced Loran (eLoran) system, as well as continuation of the Loran‐C signal in the interim; Secretary Napolitano is weighing termination of both programs. The letter asserts that It can not be accurately certified that termination of the operation of the Loran‐C signal will not adversely impact the safety of maritime navigation — counter to opinions recently issued by the U.S. Coast Guard Commandant. Finally, the letter affirms that the Loran‐C infrastructure is needed to complete the eLoran system to serve as a backup to the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS).

The RTCM is an international non-profit scientific, professional and educational organization, consisting of more than 120 government and non-government organizations actively engaged in the development of international standards for maritime radionavigation and radiocommunication systems.

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Re: RTCM Asserts Loran Key to Navigation and GPS	by: SaveGA on: December 18, 2009 - 7:39pm
Part 1 Tso Ping Mei smiled and laughed quietly to himself as he drove down a quiet stretch of the New Jersey turnpike in the middle of the night. Tso had just installed the last of a series of innocuous looking boxes in a field some miles to the west of New York City. It was not a large box, and it certainly didn’t look very threatening. It was about the size of a window air conditioner and on the outside only sported a single whip antenna and a smaller GPS patch antenna. Inside it contained a small party size helium cylinder, a GPS receiver, a battery, a LORAN receiver and a latex balloon, and a small payload that would be carried aloft when the balloon inflated. It, and the other 299 units like it had a single purpose. It was so simple, and it had been handed like a gift to him by the U.S. government itself.

Re: RTCM Asserts Loran Key to Navigation and GPS	by: SaveGA on: December 18, 2009 - 7:40pm
Part 2 Things almost went horribly wrong when in the last days of the previous U.S. presidents administration it was announced that the LORAN system would be kept as a backup to GPS, but with a few well placed campaign contributions and some influence in the General Accounting Office, China succeeded in convincing the incoming U.S. president that it was an ‘obsolete’ system. The administration and the congress, preoccupied with the distractions of the worst economy since the great depression, and the herculean task of overhauling the U.S. health care industry didn’t bat an eye at the reports that the previous administration had used as the basis of making a sound policy decision. Instead, the system was set to be terminated in January of 2010.

Re: RTCM Asserts Loran Key to Navigation and GPS	by: SaveGA on: December 18, 2009 - 7:40pm
Part 3 Without LORAN, and with GPS being so easy to jam, it was simply a matter of having the 300 boxes located across the U.S. sense the termination of the LORAN signal, and then, at exactly 05:00 Central time to deploy their payloads. Each balloon would ascend with it’s GPS jammer simultaneously across the U.S. Computer and telecommunications networks that rely on GPS, and were previously backed up by LORAN receivers would now be helpless. Within a matter of hours networks would fail. Air traffic would slow to a crawl, power lines would fail, and the fragile cyber infrastructure of the most powerful nation on earth would grind to a halt. And this was the perfect time to do it.

Re: RTCM Asserts Loran Key to Navigation and GPS	by: SaveGA on: December 18, 2009 - 7:41pm
Part 4 With the state of the U.S. economy, China suddenly found itself in the position of making almost $500 million dollars a day in interest payments on loans to the U.S. Tipping the U.S. into chaos for the one to two days the plan would cause would further weaken the economy and allow China to claim an even bigger piece of the U.S. pie. Now it was just a matter of waiting for the U.S. to leave the door open, and soon Tso would be made very rich. Contact Secretary Napolitano and let her know LORAN is needed to prevent crippling damage to our national security. The Honorable Janet Napolitano Secretary U.S. Department of Homeland Security Washington, DC 20528