Loran C Demise

[tpbrady]

The Coast Guard announced today the end of Loran C service starting Feb 10 with complete shutdown by Oct 1.

http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/Loran/default.htm

I know there are some Coasties at remotes sites in Alaska who are looking forward to going home.

From a practical standpoint since not many of us have Loran installed, there is not much impact, but at the same time I wonder what eLoran with GPS would have been like.

[thataway]

The demise of Loran C has been predicted for some time. Fishermen, and I suspose a few die hards who feel that if GPS goes down, that you have to have Loran C to back it up, have hung onto the Loran bandwagon. I was elated to have my first Loran C in the mid 70's ( I had used Loran A on a couple of racing boats before that), but it is an outdated technology. I had been looking at a few larger trawlers recently which date from the early 80's and almost all of these still have functioning Loran C units. There are still lots of gulf coast fisherman who rely on their "numbers" for reefs, feeling that the repeatablity is better than GPS (which I disagree with).

[Matt Gurnsey]

At one point, the future of Loran was being tied into Homeland Security as a system that could not be interupted like teh satillite based GPS. Si-Tex even came out with a Loran / GPS combo unit....

I remember in the early seventies the guy who owned the boat down the dock, who was a six pack charter fisherman, dragged us down to his boat to show his newest aquisition, that was going to make his job so much easier. A box the size of a modern microwave was at the lower helm of his boat.

You guessed it- Loran C. Probably set him back $3000 in 1975 dollars. Now you can buy a $100 handheld GPS that has 100 times the computing power of that old box.

[dotnmarty]

[starcrafttom]

Loran C? who's she ? i never meet her. Really i had not idea that it was still even working.

[El and Bill]

Ah the 'good ol' days of plotting the triangle of error has finally been replaced by the 'circle of error.' Some not so fond memories of navigating in the dark or fog trying to line up those darn towers along the Gulf Coast.

And the coast guardsmen who were assigned to the tower in Nevada, and lived in our NV home town, are now going to have to leave the desert and head to the coast - poor fellows. They joined the CG to be assigned to the NV desert, didn't they?

[JamesTXSD]

We drove by the road to that tower yesterday. (In the NV desert)

Loran C was a fine piece of nav gear in its day. I flew behind a couple of them, including one of the first IFR-certified units. Oh, there was the dreaded "Mid-Continent Gap" (a concern for pilots, not boaters), but I remember seeing the first "moving map display" hooked up to a Loran C unit... it was the phosphorus green dots on a black screen... the plane was a dot, the airport was a dot, and there were no land details. But, it seemed like real "Buck Rogers" stuff; and the last Loran we had scrolled calculated distances and bearings... push a button and it would pull up the 10 closest airports with distance and bearing. Dr. Bob mentioned the repeatability of a Loran C fix; we found it to be quite accurate... mark a fix and it would be in the same spot next time you needed it. It was the first "point to point" nav aid besides the outrageously expensive Inertial Navigation Units.

Low frequency radio waves. No need to listen to a VOR/ILS/NDB identifier. It certainly reduced the cockpit workload. We weren't boating then, but talked to off-shore boat folks who relied on it just as much.

It certainly wasn't a "global" bit of nav gear like our current GPS units, but where you could get a signal, it was pretty impressive... at the time.

Ah, the "good ol' days."

Best wishes,
Jim B.

[Levitation]

I certainly hope that the Pentagon has it's head out in the sunshine on this decision (as opposed to where it normally is)///
Yes, GPS wonderful... but!
But do you know that for $204.77 you can build a relatively simple jammer that will take out the GPS for a hundred miles in every direction? A well funded terror group could take out the GPS over the entire Eastern Seaboard on a dark and stormy night for less than five grand...
That cannot be done to Loran.. And that is why I have always been a supporter of continuing Loran - belt and suspenders...
And the continuing trend to replace ILS/VOR approaches with GPS I also view with trepidation...

The miniscule amount of money that it requires to keep the established Loran system running - as opposed to the billions that the GPS system costs - is not even a ripple in the Federal Budget pond... Seems penny wise and pound foolish, to me...

denny-o
an old troglodyte and proud of it...

[Alyssa Jean]

Be interesting to see how long it takes the CG to remove the Loran test questions from the Masters License tests.

[dotnmarty]

Here's a link to a related article in Tim Flanagan's Navagear blog. Thanks Tim!
http://www.navagear.com/

[C-Bill]

Disconnecting LORAN is asking for trouble. I support denny-o. GPS is wonderful and simple to operate until the screen goes black.

Yes - I have a LORAN-C and I like the accuracy.

Bill

[Mike...]

Does killing off Loran C mean that eLoran is dead? I thought the eLoran deployment was close to being finished.

In addition to jamming or other technical failure, let's not forget that pesky solar flare problem....
---
mike

[tpbrady]

Panbo had a feature on eLoran and the I am pretty sure the answer is yes. Maybe we can get an inexpensive INS system for a boat.

[thataway]

My understanding is that E-Loran is up and running in the UK. Many other world wide countries are continuing to use Loran C. The Military GPS has further components (frequencies, encryprtion and hardward), which make it both more accurate and less succeptable to jamming. For the most part jamming is a fairly localized phenomen. You can buy a "car Jammer" for a vey low price, but its range is only a few meters. Even the Russian or home built jammers are good for about 25 miles. Plus they are ground based. You can have directional GPS recieving antennas, to exclude the ground source jamming.

Yes, Loran could be jammed, but it takes a very powerful transmitter, and this can be found rather quickly with RDF technology--it is not the back pocket type of jammer you might consider for local GPS jamming.

I think that the risk to us boaters is low. There are more important terrorist risks which we will face in the next few years. On the other hand, the relitative cost of keeping Loran C and upgrading the Loran E is really very small.

[rogerbum]