Are we gonna fund this "GPS alternative" almost to completion and then vote to leave it too?

Either that or use the tried and tested model that has worked well for even longer:

Drop all funding and sell/give the information to another country so that they can bring it to market and make money off it.

Almost there.

Cut funding, increase taxes, get HMRC involved with some bogus investigation, make company run out of money, give donors a tip that there is a bargain to buy out.

A "GPS alterative" or rather a GNSS alternative [1] developed and used in the UK was eLoran (a rather good longwave system, not to be confused with the old Loran-C).

The system was built and switched on in 2014, giving positioning accuracies of < 10m over much of the UK and surrounding seas...... for a period of months until government funding was pulled. (Though, Korea kept their e-Loran system running due to their Northern friends playing silly buggers jamming GNSS). Pulling the plug on eLoran is now something the UK government is starting to regret. It will take years to get it up and running again.

And no, eLoran isn't a substitute for quantum navigation, or a direct substitute for GNSS, but it is a damn good string in our bow of resilient position, navigation and timing (PNT) in the UK. What's more, eLoran could be had for relative peanuts compared to the others.

Its another example of good work by British Boffins going to waste thanks to government.

[1] There are four Global Navigation Sattelite Systems (GNSS), namely Galileo, Glonass, GPS and Beidou. All four are as piss easy to jam as each other. On the other hand, jamming a strong longwave eLoran signal is rather more difficult to say the least.

> jamming a strong longwave eLoran signal is rather more difficult to say the least.

But it does tend to attract interest when you turn up in Russia to install eLoran stations around all their strategic targets

Hadn't a clue what this was - cynically thinking marketing just put the buzzword 'quantum' in front of a gyroscope. :)

A quick search tells me that it can be an accelerometer constructed from a atom interferometer which uses the wave properties (quantum) of atoms instead of photons.

So an inertial navigation system that has very low drift and high precision. Presumably requires extremely accurate and precise time keeping and the precise interferometry.

Must still be some clever people out there. ;)

Indeed. More accurate than atomic clocks are optical clocks, which have only recently escaped the lab and into a rack mount. The first example application the developers give is 'GNSS resilience'.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231113157771/en/Vector-Atomic-brings-world%E2%80%99s-first-rackmount-optical-clock-to-market

I assume that you'd need two of these...one to tell you your position, and another to tell you your speed & direction

I'm uncertain

Must still be some clever people out there. ;)

[1]Obligatory Blockheads link (mildly NSFW Youtube)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q63UoIPZFe0

I'm curious on performance and cost here. I've worked with a gyro-based INS in the past that could achieve on the order of a few km of error over 24 hours of operation. It was - how can I put this - pretty seriously not cheap. Though the system was, admittedly, decades old by the time I worked with it.

This is the kind of thing that attracts pretty well-policed export controls (it turns out to be quite useful if you're building a cruise missile, for instance) so I'm guessing those details aren't going to be public for a while.

I believe the Ukranians have ceased using the US built small diameter glide-bombs that were bodged together to be fired from HIMARS launchers because of Russian GPS jamming. They were a stop-gap while the administration were unwilling to ship ATACAMS - but it does show that weapons already can't rely on just satellite navigation. Both sides have had problems with GPS jamming interfering with their aim.

As the article says at the end, a presumably larger version of this was trialled on a Royal Navy ship last year. The Navy would want it anyway, for their submarines, even if satellites were guaranteed to always work perfectly.

The RAF's Paveway IV has an inertial backup in case of GPS failure - and can also be laser guided. Apparently the Storm Shadow / SCALP cruise missile only uses GPS as a backup, relying on a system of waypoints with programmed visual cues for its infrared imaging camera and inertial navigation as well. I guess it pays to be paranoid.

There's also been a lot of problems with air navigation in the Baltic region - because Russia keeps jamming GPS, and its caused quite a lot of problems with civilian flights.

Unlike the Cold War, where the Soviet Union often decided to be predictable in exchange for an easy life for themselves - Putin's regime appear to be quite nihilist and would often rather fuck with other people at whatever cost to themselves just to prove that they are still important. It's a sort of global dick-measuring thing, that sadly interferes with everyone else's map-measuring. Iran also seems to be in a bit of a chaos-agent mode at the moment, so I think we're just going to have to accept that common international standards will be a target and so we're going to have to harden things like civilian navigation systems.

Doesn't Galileo support an additional "channel" for military use, offering better precision and resistance to jamming?

Doesn't Galileo support an additional "channel" for military use, offering better precision and resistance to jamming?

I believe so, as I think does GPS.

I assume that these make GPS-spoofing a lot harder. But jamming a satellite signal, which is quite weak, is relatively easy when you have enough power. So I suspect it's only a marginal improvement - in terms of avoiding jamming. Although the closer you are to the satellite, and the further you are from the jammer - particularly if you've got an antenna that can filter out signals from the wrong direction - the better you're going to do. Military GPS sets are bound to be more expensive and have more bells and whistles.

It's based on the theory of Schrodinger's Airline, where you have no idea which airport you're going to arrive at until the plane has landed. Or Ryanair as it's more popularly known.

But if you subscribe to field theory, all trains go thought Clapham Junction, (or conversely, Clapham Junction goes through all trains).

Are you sure it's not Boedinger's airline? It's only when the aeroplane box opens that you discover whether the bolts have been installed on the doors at the Boeing factory...

It means you can have arrived and not arrived at the same time. Should make airport arrival boards interesting.

Ryanair's "airports" have arrival boards? Who knew?

Didn't Howard Wolowitz invent this?

https://youtu.be/az44pMHvUYk?si=twlHYJprZpnJ-Owy

They've pissed away 30-40 times that sending nobody to Rwanda.

At least this has the potential to be useful.

You have not "pissed away 30-40 times that sending nobody to Rwanda"

You have pissed it away trying unsucessfully to buy the xenophobic vote for the Tories.

>You have pissed it away trying unsucessfully to buy the xenophobic vote for the Tories.

Seems an expensive way to go about it.

You could just pay a few voters in marginal constituencies directly.

Or even cheaper - just pay a few journalists at a couple of tabloids to say that you have deported millions already