Good article, hopefully it's a priority with the Biden administration.
Of course, business interests that rely on GPS want a backup that’s just as good as the original, just as accessible and also free.
More than 10,000 incidents of GPS interference have been linked to China and Russia in the past five years. Ship captains have reported GPS errors showing them 20-120 miles inland when they were actually sailing off the coast of Russia in the Black Sea. Also well documented are ships suddenly disappearing from navigation screens while maneuvering in the Port of Shanghai. After GPS disruptions at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport in 2019, Israeli officials pointed to Syria, where Russia has been involved in the nation’s long-running civil war. And last summer, the United States Space Command accused Russia of testing antisatellite weaponry.
Eleven potential systems were tested, including eLoran, a low-frequency, high-power timing and navigation system transmitted from terrestrial towers at Coast Guard facilities throughout the United States.
“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,” said Dana Goward, the president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for the implementation of an eLoran backup for GPS.
Also under consideration by federal authorities are timing systems delivered via fiber optic network and satellite systems in a lower orbit than GPS, which therefore have a stronger signal, making them harder to hack. A report on the technologies was submitted to Congress last week.
And our smartphones that do almost everything for us and have a compass but it's GPS.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan
