Will it help them navigate the waters to enforce UK borders?

As a radio amateur I was always conscious of the musical sounds of LORAN on Top Band (1.8-2.0 mHz). GPS and money saving effectively killed it.

It seems that we have come full circle. With lots of local processing LORAN would be much easier to use than the original system which relied on good operators.

Back in the early 70’s, I worked part-time as a deckhand on a research vessel. At that time, there was a string of LORAN transmitter all along the coastline. My captain would tune into the transmitters to get a directional fix of each, and then triangulate our position on a big paper map laid out on a navigation table.The captain had a little black notebook with the coordinates of undersea pinnacles of interest, where the fish tended to congregate. The position fix is remarkably good, getting us to within tens of yards of the pinnacle peaks, with the final positioning based on sonar.

I'm guessing pilots are not trained to use 'em (that was the old navigator's job). Plus there is no little dome in the cokpit to take a reading. Maybe equip aircraft them with a 4k skyward looking cam and a some virtual sextant code. Stars (including our own) are hard to shift/jam.

May be a good solution for France, at least the southern bit, but Blighty has a national natural defence against celestial navigation. (Although it appears to be falling at the moment)

I guess the very ubiquity of GPS is what made it such a target for bad actors. But it has also suffered from a lack of investment and development since it was made more generally available. This is really the risk of any monoculture.

As we're seeing with some of the autonomous vehicles, a return to a set of complementary and redundant systems for greater resilience if any one fails is becoming popular again.

¿What do you mean monoculture?

For civilian use you have GPS, Galileo, Glonnas, baidu (and in the future, you will have UK's OneWeb) , all of them work worldwide and if you are near india you have also the regional NavIC. You can do a weighted average of many/all the positions and/or timestamps*, and plan accordingly.

For military use is the same (weighted average), but depending on your alignments, you will have less options to choose from...

* I guess if you are an european or USoAn or 5 eyes, you will concede more weight to GPS and Galileo than to GLONASS or Baidu, meanwhile, If you are a russian, chinese or NorK, you will give more weight to Glonnas and baidu. And, if you, like me are in LatAm, you could not care less, and give the same weght to all the global ones ;-)

Military planes used to have camera based digital sextants, it's what the little R2-D2 looking thing behind the cockpit of the SR-71 is.

The F-35 can use it's cameras to compare the ground topology to reference map data to find it's location.

The F-35 can use it's cameras to compare the ground topology to reference map data to find it's location.

Since they spend so much time there, a return of "you are in the maintenance hanger" will be a correct location for more than half the time. And talking of that tech-driven wonder, have I missed a Reg article on the latest NAO damnation of the misbegotten project in the past week?

The F-35 can use it's cameras to compare the ground topology to reference map data to find it's location.

Unless your enemies are in featureless Middle Eastern deserts.

Of course since people who live in such desolate wastelands could never represent a credible threat to us, we would never need to attack them

Of course since people who live in such desolate wastelands could never represent a credible threat to us, we would never need to attack them

Your logic is wrong there. US defense planners do see a need to attack them, but also know that them furrin people in fancy dress are all the same. So long as the brave US military attack and kills some, then the job is done. And therefore the inaccuracy of topology referencing navigation doesn't matter. Seems they've sold the same technology to Israel.

A company in Europe announced such a system recently. I think it's about £100,000 or something like that. It has a high resolution camera looking skywards to fix the position from celestial navigation. As it's for planes, you are well above the weather for most of a flight. In between fixes you can use modern highly accurate inertial navigation.

The intended market for it is for planes who can no longer rely on satellite navigation. It may be expensive, but it's a small fraction of the cost of an airliner.

The problem with GPS (and similar technologies) is that it is being used by drones in current wars in various parts of the world to find their targets. The countries on the receiving end are therefore jamming or spoofing the GPS signals to misdirect the drone attacks. So for example Ukrainian drone attacks on oil refineries near St. Petersburg have caused the Russians to jam or spoof GPS signals, which in turn affects airliners as far away as Estonia.

The over reliance on GPS for all sorts of things is a serious issue, and legislation is needed to ensure that providers of any critical infrastructure do not rely on it to provide important services. The story gives an example of time-stamping of business transactions, which gives a clue as to how widespread the use of it is. Given how many people rely on debit and don't carry cash, imagine how disruptive it would be if all payment networks were down because they couldn't timestamp transactions.

>The intended market for it is for planes who can no longer rely on satellite navigation

It's great for the over the oceans,cruising at 30,000ft, stage of the flight - where you don't need to know where you are anyway.

It's less useful in the, descending onto a runway at 250km/h when you are trying to ensure you arrive with a positive altitude stage where GPS replaced all those expensive precision approach systems

But we're told that high power long range LF transmission is impossible because the Chinese don't supply valves any more, that's why R4LW and the power teleswitches etc are being shut down.

Or is it that harmonics of eLORAN would blot out Test Match Special, so that's why R4LW is shutting down?

No, it is down to money.

The claim is Radio 4 on LW has too few listeners to justify its continued operating expense, let alone upgrading its transmitter (which would save a lot of energy with more modern amplifier design, but means investment). Of course there are many areas that don't get coverage by other means, and LW works out at sea beyond most other methods (other than going for starlink & IP radio, etc).

Also LW extends beyond these shores, allowing foreigners to learn the secrets of the Archers' success or to get a lead on our Mornington Crescent strategies.

That's why the BBC is cracking down on access to the BBC sounds app

That's why the BBC is cracking down on access to the BBC sounds app.

Argh. Don't remind me. I've tried using the bbc app instead, but it's completely crap compared the the sounds app (which was somewhere between bad and mediocre). The bbc app provides a small fraction of the offerings — but it doesn't really matter because it's impossible to find anything even if it is there. When the 21st rolls around and they shut down the bbc sounds app, I'll probably just give up on listening to BBC radio shows that aren't available via RSS as "podcasts".

Silly question - when we talk about GPS here, do we mean the American military system specifically (which the article does mention), or global positioning systems in general? Is Galileo also being spoofed, blocked, etc.?

They all operate in the same way, with the same very low power signal at the same frequencies.

Galileo adds a few signal assurance features, which things like WAAS added to GPS and military bands add more security but that doesn't help with things like shipping or self driving cars

They're all vulnerable. The problem is that signals are being spoofed or blocked to defend against drone attacks in countries that are involved in a war. That includes Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and perhaps others. Neighbouring countries are also affected by signal spill over, which is why it's a problem in for example Estonia.

People have for years been ringing the alarm bells about over dependence upon satellite navigation signals, including its use for things like timing signals in non-navigation applications. The drone wars have suddenly made this a real problem that we have to deal with.

Anyone who is currently using any sort of satellite navigation signal, including for purposes other than navigation, needs to be doing their research right now on alternative measures for conducting business without it.

Maps work. Just need a bit of light to see them.

With a lot of people, maps don't work.

I was wondering a while ago when the GPS jamming in the Ukraine conflict made the news whether drones could navigate by triangulation from the existing transmitters of well known public broadcasters.

If as is stands with not enough precision perhaps covertly inserting high resolution timing information into transmissions might.