On 3/5/12 2:31 AM, Charles P. Steinmetz wrote:

But this kind of thing already exists in some ways.  Consider that you
hire a private party (a licensed surveyor) to establish property
boundaries and such.  Yes, the surveyor has a legal obligation to report
their findings to the government (to the county recorder), but I've
noticed that this isn't always the case.

And until GPS came around, the government was happy to establish a place
where you could go and compare your clock to an official clock, they
didn't feel obligated to dstribute time and frequency at high accuracy.
(Where WWV isn't "high accuracy")

There's also ARINC, which is a private consortium owned mostly by air
line companies (I think) to provide communications and nav services to
airliners.

On 3/5/12 3:45 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

What about the Locata folks?  That's a tactical GPS replacement of
sorts.. precision position and time over a small area (or indoors).

BTW, I think the idea of using PN coded LF or VLF signals is a good one.
These days, doing the correlation and such is fairly easy.

On 3/5/12 6:19 AM, Charles P. Steinmetz wrote:

As someone who deals with non-FCC regulatory approval on a fairly
frequent basis, I can tell you it's not quite that simple.  If you're
the US government, you're regulated by NTIA, which works much like FCC
for licensing.  You have to tell where and when and what sort of
emissions, where and when and what sort of receivers, get permission, etc.

And if you're planning on operating outside the US, that gets
coordinated via some ITU process.

This is a HUGE problem for the plethora of colleges, businesses, and
government labs and research institutions jumping on the nanosat and
cubesat bandwagon. Their operations don't really fit within the "amateur
radio" bucket, where licensing is fairly easy.

and (ii) the geographic area of the operating theater is

Perhaps not a unified one, but I can see a variety of proprietary or
private locating networks being set up.  Surveyors already have high
accuracy reference networks.  Some are state run, but others are run by
consortiums or private parties.  20 years ago, you used to be able to
subscribe to a private service that would give you differential
corrections for GPS via a FM broadcast subcarrier or pager.

In message 4F54D075.6070205@febo.com, John Ackermann N8UR writes:

Well, define "rely".  If they're using a Cs and GPS-steer that when
there is good GPS, I don't see much of a problem.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp      | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG        | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer      | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

A "light footprint" LORAN is what I've been suggesting for several days.

As to putting it into private hands, there is a potential for massive
finmancial fraud in market arbitrage. It was only a couple of weeks ago
that this made headlines with GPS timing.

-John

=============

On 3/5/2012 10:13 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

If the claim is "independent of GPS" any reliance on GPS in the system
would be troublesome.  But I'll admit we don't know yet what the stated
goal of the system is...

A woman is waiting outside of the operating room for news of her
husbands fate. After some hours of waiting a physician comes to her and
in a soft voice gives her the news that he has passed. The situation at
hand was that the paperwork was beyond the operating teams capabilities.

We will learn, I hope sometime in the near future, what the written
permissions will be for this Loran experiment. My bet is that there is a
desire for backup precision marine navigation around port cities where
LightSquared will find most of its customers. This implies LightSquareds
financial and political base are a force to discard GPS performance in
these ports. So it would seem to me that the Coast Guard sees the
investment as a necessary retrenchment to their original move to abandon
Loran to the FAA many years ago.

Greg

On 3/5/2012 8:37 AM, Jim Lux wrote:

Hi

If you are doing a "light footprint" system, why fire up the old heavy
footprint gear at all?

Bob

-----Original Message-----
From: time-nuts-bounces@febo.com [mailto:time-nuts-bounces@febo.com] On
Behalf Of J. Forster
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2012 10:40 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Loran in the US

A "light footprint" LORAN is what I've been suggesting for several days.

As to putting it into private hands, there is a potential for massive
finmancial fraud in market arbitrage. It was only a couple of weeks ago
that this made headlines with GPS timing.

-John

=============

time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com
To unsubscribe, go to
https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.

The best and by far lowest cost solution is to pay TV stations and
maybe AM broadcast stations to add a timing pulse a few times per
second.  No transmitters to build.  The receivers would be more
complete but that is OK in 2012.  In the "old days"  it was to
expensive to put a complex computer inside a radio but now that is
routine.    So I can imagine a receivers that can listen to 20 or 30
broadcast stations, look of the latitude and longitude of each one and
compute a best fit to the delays.  Actually that is how GPS works but
only in L1

Traditionally the main problem with using comercail radios for
navigation has been then they don't issue a station ID frequenty
enough so you have to listen for a long time to know what station
you've tuned.  But radio with a computer inside would know the
station by it's frequency and the approx. location of the receiver.

On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 1:02 PM, Charles P. Steinmetz
charles_steinmetz@lavabit.com wrote:

--

Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California