GPS In Trouble: No Backup Plan Ready to Step in if GPS Fails

For those of us who are location challenged, GPS navigation over the last twenty years has been life-altering. With GPS navigation apps and devices there is no need to consult maps or wrack our brain to try to remember landmarks and markings that can help us find our destinations. In 1995, the US GPS system became available to the public.

The problem is that while our GPS system is wonderful in how it has improved our lives, it is also surprisingly fragile and corruptible. First off, GPS signals are radio waves that travel long distances between themselves and earth, so that those waves reaching the earth are relatively weak, and that weakness makes them easy to jam or spoof. After 25 years the GPS satellite collection is aging.

What is the alternative? land-based navigation is one. During World War II the US developed an array of terrestrial transmitters for positioning and navigation. The system was called LORAN, Long Range Aids to Navigation, and covered North America, Europe, and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere. In the 90’s interest focused on the GPS system because it had finer accuracy. The US would need to upgrade the existing LORAN system to eLORAN (enhanced long-range navigation). A huge advantage of eLORAN is that the signal is much stronger than the one from GPS and is very difficult to jam. Unlike GPS, eLORAN is available indoors and even under water.

Global rivals, like Russia, China and Iran have all built and operate navigational systems complementary to their own separate satellite navigation systems. Dana Goward, the president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, said that “China, Russia, Iran, South Korea and Saudi Arabia all have eLORAN systems because they don’t want to be as vulnerable as we are to disruptions of signals from space.”

The US has been left behind. But in addition to building terrestrial navigation systems like eLORAN, we would also need to build into devices and receivers that ability to pick up the special eLORAN signals. Some experts say that a minimum of four years might be an optimistic target for doing that.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, professor at George Washington University, said “we do not want to depend on GLONASS or Baidu. What we want to do is have a terrestrial system, a ground system that doesn’t depend on satellites.”