[sailingdog]

Originally Posted by garyp

Weighing in late on the Loran issue here. Been working on the boat.

Fact is, there are an awful lot of commercial fishermen still using Loran.
Also, I believe most professional navigators would tell you its an important backup for coastal navigation. Sextants, while valuable offshore, are just not much good for coastal navigation.

Consider too, for the paranoid types, the Chinese are playing around with shooting down satellites. Not to mention, the US Gov can very easily encode or shut down gps signals in times of emergency.

While I understand that many commercial fisherman still use LORAN as their primary navigation reference, the number of people using it has been declining for a while now... ever since GPS became affordable. Many newer boats don't have LORAN on them, and getting a LORAN receiver is very expensive compared to getting a low-end GPS chartplotter.

I don't think that China is willing to shoot down GPS satellites as that would be considered an act of war... Also, as for the government shutting down GPS, I doubt they would in the case of anything less than a global shooting war. The economic costs to shutting down GPS, especially here in the United States would be too high. Many companies now rely upon it to aid them in doing business. Many trucking firms use GPS to help with truck routing and logistics, as do most of the big delivery firms, like UPS, FedEx, and such.

It is far cheaper for the US to launch a few extra satellites to give GPS extra redundancy of coverage, than it would be to build LORAN stations. Also of importance is the fact that LORAN is primarily a nautical solution, where GPS is applicable to nautical, terrestrial and aviation markets.