Where will you be when your navigation system fails?

At approximately 3:00 PM EST today February 8, 2010 the U.S. Coast Guard stopped transmitting Loran from most of its transmitters.  The only transmissions continuing are part of transmission chains with either Canada or Russia and these transmissions are projected to be terminated by summer 2010.

The U.S. Loran system has been modernized over the last 10 years and was ready to be upgraded to eLoran when President Obama identified it for termination in 2009.  The eLoran system was designed to be a backup for GPS and had many backers from industry, academia and Congress.  eLoran would have provided the needed resilience to the existing nation wide PNT (Position, Navigation and Timing) infrastructure which is at risk from unintentional and intentional jamming and outages.

The current Loran system is operated by the U.S. Coast Guard with a $36 million budget thus resulting in a 5 year $190 million dollar savings according to the Office of Management and Budget.  Government commissioned studies have concluded and demonstrated the Loran system could be operated with a $10 million annual budget and the streamlined operation of the system would result in improved stability and quality of the system.

CrossRate Technology, LLC continues to push the U.S. Government to keep the Loran system operational and not dismantle the system.  Dismantling of the Loran infrastructure will result in very little savings but dramatically increase the startup costs when the Department of Homeland Security recognizes a backup to GPS is needed.  In the mean time CrossRate will focus on the international community where there is strong support of Loran and conviction that GPS requires a non-satellite based backup technology.