GL: GPS reliability

[Ralph Yost (home)]

The Federal govenrment has decided that that LORAN should continue operating 
for the foreseeable future. It appears there was a unanimous endorsement by 
an independent panel of experts convened by The Dept of Transportation and 
Homeland Security. There as also an overwhelming positive response to an 
earlier public survey regarding the system's continuance. Then there were 
two unforecasted severe solar eruptions that occurred in December. Last 
month's Space Weather Enterprise Forum in Washington, D.C. characterized 
them as "produced 20,000 times more radio emissions than the entire rest of 
the sun, enough to swamp GPS receivers over the entire sunlit side of 
 Earth." And WAAS signals, which are much harder to effect, were also 
affected. Advocates for LORAN have been proposing  LORAN as a necessary 
backup for GPS during outages.

R.