As of December 31st of last year, most of Europe's Loran-C stations were shut off. Originally it was a unilateral - or bilateral? - decision by Norway and France to terminate operation of Loran-C sites in their countries. After 2010, when the US and Canada announced the permanent end of Loran-C operation in North America, the EU had made a point that it intended to keep and even expand Loran-C as part of its "Eurofix" navigation and timing system, especially because of Loran-C's potential as a backup to GPSS. Despite this commitment, late in 2015 Norway and France announced they'd be shutting down several stations they operated, leaving really only two operational Loran-C sites - one in the UK and one in Germany. Since position-fixing with Loran-C requires reception of three stations (otherwise you get an arc rather than a fix), the UK realized that navigation with Loran-C was now effectively compromised and decided to shut its station down at the same time after Norway and France made their announcement. Now a single European Loran-C site in Germany remains operational, though useless for navigation. As of now, pretty much only Asia has an effective Loran-C grid, run by Russia, China, and India.
Of course, the need for an alternate system to backup the somewhat vulnerable GPS still remains. Up until the sudden collapse of Loran-C the US and other governments were working on developing a sort of upgrade called "eLoran", a system which used the same frequencies but had some fundamental differences in operation and expense. But aside from a few several-years-old articles about how "they're working on it", I can't find anything particularly solid as far as whether eLoran is still on the stove, who exactly is working on it if so, and when we can expect to start seeing things happen. Anybody have any ideas or insight?
I'm primarily interested in this issue from an aviation navigation standpoint, although of course anyone can discuss it in any other context.
Of course, the need for an alternate system to backup the somewhat vulnerable GPS still remains. Up until the sudden collapse of Loran-C the US and other governments were working on developing a sort of upgrade called "eLoran", a system which used the same frequencies but had some fundamental differences in operation and expense. But aside from a few several-years-old articles about how "they're working on it", I can't find anything particularly solid as far as whether eLoran is still on the stove, who exactly is working on it if so, and when we can expect to start seeing things happen. Anybody have any ideas or insight?
I'm primarily interested in this issue from an aviation navigation standpoint, although of course anyone can discuss it in any other context.
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