LORAN Lives to Another Day
November 18, 2006 GPS WorldThe U.S. House and Senate Conference Committee has reportedly once more blocked efforts to cut off air to the LORAN system, owned and operated by the U.S. Coast Guard. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), overseeing the Coast Guard, had allocated zero funding for LORAN in its 2007 budget. But Congress has put several procedural hurdles in the way of closure while awaiting an independent review.
Congress may or may not have gotten an advance peek at the report of the recently formed, 11-member LORAN Independent Assessment Team, high-ranking specialists in navigation and timing technologies led by Brad Parkinson. At the very least, the Conference Committee is stalling on a LORAN verdict until the team's report, under auspices of Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), a federally funded research and development think tank, to the Department of Transportation in late November or early December.
GPS Backup.The key technical issue involves LORAN's potential as a backup to GPS during accidental or deliberate jamming and solar interference effects, and in obstructed environments. LORAN provides a low-frequency, reliable and, according to its supporters, essentially unjammable signal for navigation and high-accuracy timing.
The new enhanced or eLORAN mode would incorporate chipset-level LORAN receivers into GPS modules, operating autonomously to track an aircraft's (for example) position using signals from every station within 1,000 miles or more.
FAA flight tests have shown that eLoran can provide corrected position accuracies close to GPS positions, and nanosecond-level timing, already in use as GPS backup in critical infrastructure such as telecommunications, banking, and utility control systems.
Cost, as ever, constitutes the prime bone of contention. DHS reportedly thinks modernization will cost around $350 million, and follow-on operating costs would be $35 million per year. Others have suggested that a civil contractor could perform the necessary work and convert LORAN stations to unmanned operation for about $60 million, and $12 million per year for continued maintenance.
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