Loran - C Ya?

Do the terms "GRI" and "TD" mean anything to you? If so, you are among the hundreds of thousands of boaters and pilots who use loran-C for navigation. You have to know these terms to use a loran, and if the government has its way, these terms--and your loran receiver--will be as outdated as a Remington typewriter in just a few years.It's as familiar as an old boat shoe, but loran-C--the reliable, decades-old radionavigation system--is headed for the electronics dumpster. And if it goes, so will the safety and redundancy of two navigation systems that mariners have depended on for years. Without loran, we'll have to rely solely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) for navigation data, and some say that could be a costly, and dangerous, mistake.

A case in point is the grounding of the 568-foot cruise ship Royal Majesty off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts on June 10, 1995. According to Bill Brogdon, a retired U.S. Coast Guard captain and president of the International Loran Association (ILA), the Royal Majesty was navigating solely on GPS when she ran aground on a shoal. The cause, says Brogdon, was in part due to a faulty GPS antenna cable which caused the receiver to automatically revert to dead-reckoning navigation, and this went unnoticed by the crew. Ultimately, Brogdon says "The ship was 17 miles off course when she ran aground, and when they fired up their loran, it showed they were right on top of the shoal."

Brogdon is very concerned about relying on a single source for electronic navigation, and he's not alone. In the January 6, 1997 edition of the Navy Times, even the Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, Admiral Robert E. Kramek, expressed his concerns. "You can't become totally reliant on differential GPS," he said, "you need to check the fathometer once in a while, you have to check LORAN C and check the radar, and take a real visual bearing."

Bob Lilley, a past president of the ILA and aircraft pilot agrees, saying, "I am really uncomfortable with the concept of turning everything off but GPS. Any one system has some kind of vulnerability, and loran and GPS are not just for navigation--we use them extensively in our timing as well."

Indeed, the precise timing capabilities of loran and GPS are behind the scenes in all of our lives. Lynn Roth is president of LOCUS Inc., a manufacturer of precision-timing devices for the telecommunications industry. He also feels we need keep both loran and GPS, but for different reasons.

"One of the big uses for loran and GPS," he says, "is in cellular-phone base stations. In order to seamlessly pass your call from one cell to another, the base stations must be synchronized, and they do that with timing signals from loran and GPS. It's the same thing with 911 calls, and fax and data transmissions--even the utility companies use it."

Roth says GPS is the primary timing method for cellular-phone transmissions, but he warns, "You can have problems with GPS. TV transmitters can interfere with the signals, and solar activity can also interrupt it. We need a backup to GPS since it's not 100-percent reliable." In fact, Roth says there have been several instances--not well publicized--where GPS has temporarily failed and loran has stepped in to keep the nation's telecommunications running smoothly.

"Because they're so different in their technologies loran vs. GPS the things that tend to disrupt one system won't affect the other. This creates a virtually fail-safe situation, and that's why we need a backup to GPS."

You don't have to walk too far down the dock to confirm that--just ask any fisherman. Brogdon points out that many commercial fishermen mark "hangs" (sea-mounts that can snag their nets) with loran TD coordinates, and that data will be useless if loran is discontinued. While some GPS receivers can convert TDs to latitude and longitude, Brogdon says the mathematical conversion is subject to errors of 200- to 500 yards, and that's not nearly accurate enough to avoid trouble. Sportfishermen and divers also rely on the high repeatable accuracy of loran, and the only precise way to convert TDs to lat/lon is to go back to a spot--using loran--and then enter its position into the GPS as a waypoint. Brogdon feels this method will cost mariners millions of dollars over time.

If loran is so good, so reliable, and so widely accepted, then why shut it down? Money, the government says, pure and simple. It costs about $17 million a year to operate the U.S. loran system, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to the $500 million to $1 billion it takes to maintain the GPS (a hard-and-fast dollar amount is not available). Nevertheless, the Federal Government has moved up the timetable to shut down loran by making changes to its own policies.

Every two years, the Department of Transportation (DOT) is responsible for revising the Federal Radionavigation Plan (FRP) which maps out our nation's policy on electronic navigation. In developing the plan, the DOT invites comments from loran users, and last year the agency held two public conferences in February, 1996. Following those meetings, the DOT published a report called DOT SUMMARY--1996 Radionavigation Users Conferences. In it, the summary addressed the phaseout of loran by stating: "Past versions of the FRP called for a 10-15 year transition period for the phaseout of radionavigation systems. For the 1994 FRP it was recognized that budget realities, the increasingly rapid rate of technological change, and user demand for new systems made that lengthy transition period unreasonable. A suitable transition period in today's environment may be much shorter."

This "shorter" transition period is what's worrying most loran users, and the current government policy on loran boils down to this: Even though the 1992 FRP called for a loran phase-out by the year 2015, the 1994 edition moved it up to the year 2000. And in the 1996 FRP, LCDR Phil D'Agnese, chief of the Coast Guard's Radionavigation Planning Division, told me the only change was to set a date--right now, loran is scheduled for termination on December 31, 2000. So the last bullet is in the chamber, and the fate of loran appears to be sealed. Or is it?

When I asked D'Agnese if the public's comments did any good in delaying the shut-down of loran, he pointed out that "Not one maritime person stood up at the FRP Public Hearings," to fight for loran, though the aviation community was well represented. As a boating writer, I immediately felt responsible for not letting you--our reader--know about these hearings, but Brogdon exonerated me. "You didn't know? I didn't know!" he said, going on to explain that no press releases were issued about the hearings, and the people who did attend only received invitations since they'd been to those hearings before.

But frankly, that's water under the bridge now. While loran use is growing in Europe--and Raytheon is the only American company that will continue to manufacture loran receivers to supply that market--the loran system is on Death Row here. But at least they haven't thrown the switch yet.

"I still see a crack in the door," says Lilley. And ever the optimist, Lilley has developed his own plan, one he calls the "Loran Revitalization Act of 1997," which says if monies slated for the loran system can be invested in improving the technology of the transmitting stations, fewer people will be required to man those stations, and the operating costs can be pared down to a paltry $10 million a year. For his sake and ours let's hope he's right, and that the powers that be in Washington will listen. Otherwise, you better make some room next to that typewriter, because your old loran receiver will be moving in.

Ed. Note: Loran’s future—at least for the next few years—appears to be secure as its been saved by government funding and represents an effective and relatively inexpensive back-up navigation system to GPS.