NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Over-reliance on GPS
From: Jeremy C
Date: 2008 Nov 13, 04:37 EST
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From: Jeremy C
Date: 2008 Nov 13, 04:37 EST
Lu writes:
"Carl, let's be careful here. LORAN was primarily deployed in
North America (I believe there was also some coverage in the Pacific due to US
territories there and Japan also operated a chain). Loran is being
brought back in the US. I don't know about Canada and I'm pretty sure it's
not being resurrected in the Pacific. So while it's great (I did a
lot of precision electronic navigation using Loran way before GPS) Loran
certainly doesn't provide the worldwide coverage provided by
GPS."
LORAN isn't being "brought back" so much as enhanced as Carl
mentioned. eLORAN will have an additional signal encoded in it to enhance
accuracy among other improvements. There is a good article on the USCG
website about it that I would link to except that I have only sporadic email
here at sea and no Internet connection.
The Japan/Guam chain is still going strong, and of course the chains on the
US coasts are there as well. Lu is correct that it gets sketchy outside of
groundwave coverage, and is certainly just a mid-ranged system that should
compliment GPS nicely out to several hundred miles from the stations.
What will be interesting to see is the EU version of GPS (I forget the
name) which should then offer us two independent systems of deep sea electronic
navigation which will give us a third navigation system in the deep
oceans. I look forward to that.
Jeremy
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