Where’s the GPS Gone?

Fel­low blo­gista Denis Bryant  has often expressed con­cern about the US aban­don­ment of Loran-C in favour of a total depen­dency on GPS. After all, what can go wrong? Denis answers that ques­tion in a cur­rent blog:

“By now, almost every­one is aware that, in accor­dance with a Con­gres­sional direc­tive and as a bud­get mea­sure, the Loran-C sig­nal from most US trans­mis­sion sites is being ter­mi­nated as of 2000Z, 8 Feb­ru­ary 2010. The United States is now rely­ing almost exclu­sively on the Global Posi­tion­ing Sys­tem (GPS) as its sole method of elec­tronic nav­i­ga­tion. I have been opposed to putting all of our eggs into one bas­ket and have men­tioned pre­vi­ous prob­lems with GPS. The GPS Oper­a­tions Cen­ter reported a sig­nif­i­cant GPS outage

in the San Diego area on Jan­u­ary 22, 2007 that forced the Coast Guard to oper­ate its ves­sels in restricted sta­tus. Med­ical pag­ing in the area was shut down for approx­i­mately two hours and two cell phone tow­ers were out of ser­vice. The 2007 event in San Diego is not unique; rather it is just one of many local­ized GPS ser­vice out­ages. This newslet­ter has always relied on open sources for its infor­ma­tion. Today, I am mak­ing an excep­tion. A recent, and dis­turb­ing, report has come to my atten­tion stat­ing that a sim­i­lar, but pos­si­bly more severe, dis­rup­tion occurred on Feb­ru­ary 6, 2010, again in the San Diego area, affect­ing air­lines and cell phone ser­vice, among oth­ers. I do not know the cause and it is not par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant. The point is that GPS is highly sus­cep­ti­ble to dis­rup­tion; Loran-C is not. Loran-C is admit­tedly old tech­nol­ogy, but it is proven. It is not too late for the Loran-C shut­down deci­sion to be re-examined.”