Google Ad Patent May Offer Consumers Free Cab Rides To Businesses

As reported by Red Orbit: Technology giant Google has acquired a patent for a free (or highly discounted) taxi service that would provide transportation to an advertiser’s business location. This could include restaurants, shops and other entertainment venues, and could possibly encourage consumers to respond more often to location-based special offers.  

The technology is based around algorithms that would determine a customer’s location, find the best route and desired form of transport.

The search giant described this patent as a “Transportation-aware physical advertising conversions.” It was actually filed on January 11, 2011 and received publication on January 14 of this year. Luis Ricardo Prada Gomez, Andrew Timothy Szybalski, Sebastian Thrun, Philip Nemec and Christopher Paul Urmson were listed as the inventors. These same individuals were among those previously responsible for Google’s patent for a driverless car and numerous other innovations.

“The present invention relates generally to arranging for free or discounted transportation to an advertiser’s business location,” Google noted in the abstract on the company’s official patent website. “More specifically, the invention involves automatically comparing the cost of transportation and the potential profit from a completed transaction using a number of real-time calculations. For example, the calculation may consider various factors including a consumer’s current location, the consumer’s most likely route and form of transportation (such as train, personal car, taxi, rental car, or shared vehicle), the consumer’s daily agenda, the price competing advertisers are willing to pay for the customer to be delivered to alternate locations, and other costs. In this regard, the customer’s obstacles to entering a business location are reduced while routing and cost calculations are automatically handled based on the demand for the advertiser’s goods and potential profit margins.”

Google has found that for many brick-and-mortar shops the most difficult part is getting people to their actual physical locations. Google’s invention could help bring those customers in. According to the patent this technology in essence works by determining a user’s location, the route and potential forms of transport to an advertiser’s business. It also looks to determine the price that advertisers might be willing to pay for the customer to be delivered to a particular location.

To accomplish this could involve advertisers calling upon databases that record people’s various habits, including likes and preferences so that the ads could be more highly targeted. It would combine that information with location data that could be gathered from Wi-Fi, cellular and GPS tracking that would in turn enable businesses to truly tailor very specific ads and special offers to customers. This could also be based on the daily habits of would-be consumers so the time of day and schedules are taken into consideration.

Those in the ad game seem to believe that this invention has merit.

“This is trying to turn advertising into a utility and remove barriers for consumers,” Gregory Roekens, chief technology officer at the advertising firm of AMV BBDO, told BBC on Sunday. “It’s a really interesting idea.”

The key part is ensuring the offers come when people are closer to the business trying to lure them in.

“Travel takes a huge amount of people’s time,” Roekens added. “So if people can use this time more productively and interactively while in the vehicle, there’s another opportunity for advertisers.”

Testing Drone Beer Delivery on the Frozen Northern Lakes

As reported by GIS User: What’s a beer company to do when it realizes its customers are located in isolated ice fishing shacks miles away from the nearest liquor retailer… and they’re thirsty?

Most beer companies would give up. But not Lakemaid Beer, the Fishermen’s Lager. Having recently launched its new Lakemaid Frosty Winter Lager, the perfect beer for ice fishing season, Lakemaid Beer has turned to new technology to meet the needs of its thirsty customers.

The answer: the Lakemaid Beer Drone.

Inspired by Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, which has been testing the drone delivery of its products, Lakemaid Beer has been testing a new drone delivery system on some of the top ice fishing lakes in Minnesota and Wisconsin.  Below is a video from their web site:

“Amazon faces a lot of obstacles,” said Lakemaid Beer Company’s president, Jack Supple. “Dense urban locations present a host of problems to drone delivery. But our tests are on vast, wide-open frozen lakes free of trees and power lines. Our drone can fly as the crow flies, straight to our target, based on GPS coordinates provided by an ice angler. Fish houses are very uniform in height, so we can fly lower than FAA limits, too.”

“It’s the perfect proving ground for drone delivery,” said Supple, “Our initial tests on several mid-size lakes have been very successful. We’re looking forward to testing the range of our drones on larger lakes.”

“We’d be happy to share our research with Amazon,” Supple added.

It may be awhile before Lakemaid Beer can officially deliver its beer by drone. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) currently restricts the commercial use of drones by small businesses, and remote verification of the legal drinking age of ice anglers will need to be addressed. The FAA is expected to issue new regulations governing the commercial use of drones by 2015.

“Our customers, distributors and retailers appreciate the extra effort we’re willing to go to get Lakemaid Frosty Winter Lager to them,” said Supple. “Even if our customers are located 4 miles out in one of the 5,500 ice shacks on Lake Mille Lacs (one of Minnesota’s largest lakes).”

To learn more about Lakemaid Beer, the official beer of Rapala, visit http://www.lakemaidbeer.com.

When A $65 Cab Ride Costs $192

As reported by NPR: I was in the car for about an hour, rolling around Manhattan in the middle of a snowstorm. The ride normally would have cost me $65. But when it came time to pay, my driver, Kirk Furye, was concerned for me.

"Are you going to get in trouble with NPR?" he asked. "You are almost at three times the [normal] amount."
Final cost of a one-hour cab ride: $192.00.

I had found Furye through Uber, a company that makes an app that connects cabs and cars with people who are looking for rides. One thing about Uber: When there's a lot of demand — like, say, in the middle of a snowstorm — the price goes way up.

Uber calls this surge pricing; a lot of people might call it gouging. But Uber drivers aren't employees with hourly schedules; they choose when and whether to drive. And, Uber says, raising prices when demand is high is a way to get more drivers on the road to meet that demand.

Uber tracks customers and drivers down to the street level, and even in normal weather there can be brief price surges in neighborhoods when demand spikes.


"When I first started out, I used to chase the surge," Furye said. "But that became exhausting, because it would always go somewhere else by the time I got there."

In other words, the surge system was increasing the supply of drivers to busy neighborhoods so quickly that, by the time Furye got there, prices had fallen back to normal.

But even if it works in the short run, surge pricing could hurt Uber in the long run if taken to extremes, says Richard Thaler, an economist at the Chicago Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

Other industries that raise prices when demand is high, like hotels, put limits on their own surge pricing in order to keep customer loyalty. Hotels will rarely charge more than three times the normal price, even though they could charge far more at peak periods, Thaler says.

US Lab Developing Technology For Space Traffic Control

As reported by Network World: Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory say they have tested technology that could eventually help them monitor and control space traffic.

The driving idea behind the project is to help keep satellites and other spacecraft from colliding with each other or other debris in Low Earth Orbit. 

Recently the Lawrence Livermore team  said they used a series of six images over a 60-hour period taken from a ground-based satellite to prove that it is possible to refine the orbit of another satellite in low earth orbit.

Specifically, the Livermore team refined the orbit of the satellite NORAD 27006, based on the first four observations made within the initial 24 hours, and predicted NORAD's trajectory to within less than 50 meters over the following 36 hours. By refining the trajectory of NORAD 27006 with their ground-based payload, the team believes they will be able to do the same thing for other satellites and debris once their payload is orbiting earth, the team stated.

The technology used to redirect NORAD 27006 and refine its orbit are being developed for Livermore's still developing Space-Based Telescopes for Actionable Refinement of Ephemeris (STARE) mission.  Ultimately STARE will consist of a constellation of nano-satellites in low earth orbit, that will provide data and work  to refine orbits of satellites and space debris to less than 100 meters, the team stated.

According to the Livermore web site, "Each nano-satellite in the constellation is capable of recording an optical image of space objects (debris or assets) at various range and relative velocities as scheduled by the ground infrastructure based on their closest approach distance (typically less than 1000m). The ground infrastructure processes the data received from multiple observations of the objects and reduces the positional uncertainty on the probability of collision to a level typically less than 100m, warranting taking actions such as moving assets. For an 18 nano-satellite constellation, STARE has the capability to reduce the collision false alarm rate by 99% up to 24 hours ahead of closest approach."

In a 2011 paper about STARE, the Livermore scientists wrote: " STARE is a proof-of-concept mission whose goal is to improve upon the orbital ephemerides [the position of astronomical objects] obtained by ground based instruments for a small population of satellites and debris to the level where a predicted collision is actionable. To do this, two Cubesat satellites will be launched into a 700 km polar orbit where they will image other satellites at optical wavelengths during closest approach. The images will then be processed along with Global Positioning Service (GPS) data to refine the position and trajectory of the targets. If successful, the mission will pave the way for a small constellation of similar satellites capable of refining ephemerides for all of the satellites and debris pieces involved in close approaches."

According to Livermore scientists, accurately predicting the location of a satellite in low earth orbit at any given time is hard because of the uncertainty in the quantities needed for the equations of motion. Atmospheric drag, for instance, is a function of the shape and mass of the satellite as well as the density and composition of the unstable atmosphere. These uncertainties and the incompleteness of the equations of motion lead to a quickly growing error in the position and velocity of any satellite being tracked in low earth orbit.

To account for these errors, the US Space Surveillance Network (SSN) must repeatedly observe the set of nearly 20,000 objects it tracks; however, positional uncertainty of an object is about 1 kilometer. This lack of precision leads to approximately 10,000 false alarms per expected collision. With these large uncertainties and high false alarm rates, satellite operators are rarely motivated to move their assets after a collision warning is issued, the team stated,

The STARE mission aims to reduce the 1 kilometer uncertainty down to 100 meters or smaller, which will in turn reduce the number of false alarms by roughly two orders of magnitude, the Livermore team stated.

Google’s Open Automotive Alliance Faces Competition From Apple And Microsoft

As reported by Business Car Manager:

AFTER recent rumors that Google was planning to bring a new level of Android connectivity to cars, the company has officially announced that it will be teaming up with Audi, Honda, General Motors, and Hyundai to form an Open Automotive Alliance. This OAA will also include the graphics chipset company, Nvidia, to provide greater integration of the Android platform in today’s cars.

More specific details of this alliance were announced with the 2014 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in full swing, stepping up the competition with Apple’s recent efforts to launch an in-car iOS platform.

With this announcement and others related to the future of the fully connected car, the Vegas Consumer Electronics Show has been a strong reminder of just how intersectional the tech and auto industries are becoming.

Chipset vendors, automakers, and platform companies are teaming up in alliances like Google’s to create new machines that will combine different technologies for a fully integrated, connected driving experience. Google’s Open Automotive Alliance will use a common platform and development model, with the first Android connected cars available later this year.

Yet Google’s not the only company racing to provide smartphone connectivity built into the automotive dashboard.

Hyundai, General Motors, and Audi have already announced that they will also be working with Apple.

Apple’s iOS in the Car project has been in full swing for some time now, providing direct competition for Google’s Android connectivity project.

Microsoft also has a hat in the ring, with versions of its Windows software already embedded into vehicles that you’ll find listed in showrooms and on automotive sites like Carsales.

Manufacturers including Fiat, Nissan, Kia, and Ford all use the Microsoft embedded automotive software. Furthermore, Microsoft launched an alliance of its own back in 1998 called the “Auto PC” initiative, with Citroen, Hyundai, Nissan, and Samsung all on board.

Both Google and Apple must play catch-up with Microsoft’s existing connectivity, but are primed to do so this year.

Apple’s iOS in the Car project will embed its popular Siri system into cars, along with GPS and telephone functions. A number of auto manufacturers have already signed up to participate in this platform, including those mentioned above as well as luxury brands like BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

It’s unlikely that auto manufacturers will have to choose one platform or the other, as they will want to provide the widest range of options to customers.

As a result, Audi, Hyundai, and General Motors are all taking part in both Apple’s and Google’s alliances. Google also stated in its announcement that the Open Automotive Alliance is open to future participants, so more may come on board to provide Android connectivity within their 2014 models and beyond.

In addition to Google’s announcement, the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show has showcased other ways in which cars will become more connected in the near future.

GM announced vehicles that will be enabled with the LTE network, and Qualcomm announced a new chipset that will be able to support Bluetooth, LTE, and Wi-Fi within the car. This new chip will also be able to support Android and Blackberry systems.

All of these advancements and the competition between Google, Apple, and Microsoft point to car connectivity becoming a major focal point over the next year. The future car will become a mobile computer, with full hi-tech integration.

Tech Watch: Supreme Court Rebukes Patent Court Judges (again)

As reported by GigaOM: There are many explanations for the sorry state of the U.S. patent system, but one that comes up on a regular basis is the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The pro-patent proclivity of the court, which hears every patent appeal in the land, has given it a “rogue” reputation and forced the Supreme Court to reverse its decisions again and again. This week, the Supremes did so once more.

In a 9-0 unanimous decision, the Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that the appeals court botched things anew, this time over the level of proof that a licensee must bring to challenge a patent. The nuts-and-bolts of the decision turn on procedural issues, but the gist is that it’s now easier for those targeted by patent lawsuits to file a preliminary challenge to accusations of infringement. (You can get a full run-down at Patently-O and SCOTUSblog.)


The procedural issue is important because, under the current system, patent holders — including trolls — can simply file a bare-bones lawsuit without explaining why their target is infringing the patent. Now, under the new Supreme Court ruling, the patent holder will at least have the burden of showing infringement. Congress, meanwhile, is also attempting to tighten up pleading requirements as part of the Innovation Act, a new law expected to pass this spring.

As patent reform advocates point out, this week’s ruling is just one in a series of unanimous reversals of the Federal Circuit’s patent positions. Meanwhile, the patent court’s recalcitrant judges could receive another scolding this spring when the Supreme Court hears a key case over what can and can’t be patented.

Finally, the new boss of the U.S. Patent Office this week published an inaugural blog post that expressed support for Congress’s efforts to reform “abusive patent litigation tactics.”

Proposal for U.S. eLoran Service Gains Ground

As reported by Inside GNSS:  Trying to revive a years-dead federal program is usually the kind of hopeless task that even Sisyphus wouldn’t touch.

But determined supporters of eLoran are gaining ground in their effort to resurrect the cancelled radio-navigation network and, propelled by new worries over GPS jamming, they appear poised push the issue through.

Loran, short for LOng RAnge Navigation, enables ships and aircraft to determine their speed and location using low-frequency signals broadcast from ground stations. The original, and now obsolete, Loran-C system was decommissioned in 2010. At one time, an enhanced system — eLoran — was expected to replace it with signals that, unlike GPS, could reach under ground, under water, and into buildings. eLoran is also far more sophisticated than Loran-C, said David Last, a British expert on positioning, navigation and timing systems (PNT)

“I draw the analogy by saying that Loran in its original form, which a lot of people remember, came from the days of black and white television,” Last told Inside GNSS. “What we’ve got here [with eLoran] is still television, it’s still Loran — but it’s digital. It’s high-definition. It’s color. It’s big screen. It’s all of those things.”

More importantly, the high-powered and nearly unjammable eLoran signals are an excellent backup to GPS signals and not subject to the vagaries of space warfare or asteroids. If something happened to GPS, eLoran could provide, relatively inexpensively, the positioning information needed for navigation and the timing data crucial to the power grid, cell phones, financial networks, and the Internet.

“eLoran is the only cost-effective backup for national needs,” wrote an Institute for Defense Analyses Independent Assessment Team (IAT) led by Brad Parkinson, the first director of the foundational GPS Joint Program Office.

“It is completely interoperable with and independent of GPS,” IDA’s team said in their 2009 report, “with different propagation and failure mechanisms, plus significantly superior robustness to radio frequency interference and jamming. It is a seamless backup, and its use will deter threats to U.S. national and economic security by disrupting (jamming) GPS reception.”

A paper by David Chadwick and Taehwan Kim show just how jam-resistant eLoran is. Their calculations in “An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Intentional Interference to eLoran” presented at the 2006 MILCOM conference showed the system to be so robust that jammers hidden in suitcases or broadcasting from a plane or a hijacked AM radio station could not prevent the system from operating as a GPS backup for aviation.

It’s no wonder. The signal is approximately 1.3 million times more powerful than the GPS signal, said Dana Goward, president and executive director of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation (RNT) Foundation, which supports adoption of eLoran.

“The cost was so minimal and the backup was such a powerful thing . . . it just made enormous sense,” said an expert familiar with the IAT study, particularly “in terms of deterring somebody from even bothering to jam GPS.”

The IAT’s report convinced the Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security, which threw their support behind the transition to eLoran. The program was ultimately approved by the National Executive Committee for Space-Based PNT — a group co-chaired by Deputy Secretaries from DoT and DoD.

Then, after the government spent some $160 million on upgrades, eLoran was canceled. At some point in the process of preparing its first from-scratch budget, the Obama administration zeroed out the eLoran money and killed the program in 2010 — a decision widely attributed to the Office of Management and Budget.

What exactly happened is a mystery, although numerous sources describe the decision as an attempt to save money in the wake of the Great Recession.

“I think probably the true explanation, we see it in other places as well, is twofold,” said Last. “One is the tragedy of the commons — the argument that, if something is good for everybody in the village, then nobody will want to pay for it. And that certainly applied in Washington, according to everything that I saw. The other is just the whole sense that Loran is ‘that old thing’ going back a long way. It’s very difficult to take something that was known a long time ago and convince people that the current version of it is very different.”

No agency has stepped up since to support the program — perhaps with good reason. Sources suggest that the different departments are afraid to look too interested in eLoran out of fear they will be tasked with paying for the entire program from their ever-shrinking budgets.

Impact of Jamming 
Despite its cancellation and lack of official enthusiasm, support for the program has been growing in the United States — particularly in light of an escalating number of jamming incidents. That support is now breaking out into the open at an agency level.

Last April, at a meeting organized by the U.S. Naval Observatory, the Defense Department’s Chief Information Officer Teresa Takai expressed an interest in eLoran. Takai told the audience at the “Time and Navigation, 1730-2030, from Greenwich to Space” symposium that she would like to look beyond GPS for options to improve the overall PNT capabilities for U.S. and allied warfighters.

The reason is clear, sources told Inside GNSS. The Defense Department is seeing the impact of GPS jamming overseas and is aware of how eLoran can be used to mitigate the problem.

“DoD is looking intently at what is going on in Korea,” one source said — an assessment confirmed by other experts familiar with DoD’s perspective. “The South Koreans were very intent on proceeding with eLoran, the reason being that they had actually experienced North Korean jamming of the GPS signal.”

Jamming by North Korea against its southern neighbor began in 2010. The on-going attacks have escalated to the point that they affected more than 1,000 ships and 250 planes over a 12-month period, according to a paper given in April at the European Navigation Conference (ENC) in Vienna, Austria. The paper’s statistics were presented by Jiwon Seo, an assistant professor in the School of Integrated Technology at Korea’s Yonsei University and Mincheol Kim, a deputy director of the Maritime Safety Facilities Division in the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries.

The two announced that South Korea planned to add three new eLoran stations and update two old Loran-C facilities to provide eLoran services with a better than 20-meter accuracy throughout the country by the end of 2014. It would also deploy 43 differential eLoran stations for a service to be operation by 2018. With the cooperation of Russia and China, they said, South Korean hopes to expand its eLoran system to cover all of Northeast Asia.

Other countries are taking up eLoran as well. India is planning a system of its own and Russia and Great Britain are working together to make eLoran interoperable with Chayka, the Russian version of the technology. Their goal is to use the compatible signals to improve navigation along hazardous sea routes in the Arctic, according press reports and a presentation the Internavigation Research and Technical Centre in the Russian Federation.

The Netherlands announced in December that it had installed a differential version of eLoran in the port of Rotterdam that used signals from stations in France, Germany and England. The system, which achieves accuracies of less than 5 meters, was developed in part to address the risk of disruption to satellite navigation signals.

Saudi Arabia announced plans some time ago to upgrade its Loran-C system to e-Loran and Iran announced last year that it had a new terrestrial positioning system, though little is know about it. The U.K., easily the most active of the eLoran countries, has been broadcasting eLoran signals 24/7 for nearly three years, said Last.

“About a year ago we introduced it in the Dover Straits,” Last told Inside GNSS. “That’s the part of the English Channel that is the world’s busiest maritime choke point. We get something like 500 ships a day coming through it — and ferries dashing back and forth across it. The whole area is a bit of a nightmare and, of course, it can be very foggy as well.”

Most of the ships traversing the Straits are “almost totally reliant on GPS for their navigation,” he said “and the gap that they are coming through is narrow enough that you could take out the whole of the shipping activity there — take out the GPS activity — using a fairly low-cost jammer on cliff top on either the British or the French side.”

“We took the technology from the U.S. when they dropped the ball, and we spent about three years on it,” Last said. “The outcome of that is that we have turned what was a feasibility study being done by people like the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and developed that into something that we now have a lot of faith in.”

Great Britain is poised to take it one step further. The U.K. announced plans last summer to install seven differential eLoran stations along its South and East Coasts. The differential service is to be operational by this summer.

eLoran in the States? 
With all the eLoran activity overseas, particularly in regions of strategic interest, it makes sense for DoD to support eLoran in the U.S. for its own training purposes, said one source.

The military could use commercial equipment to support their activities, they said, and would not need to expend substantial resources on developing new defense-unique equipment or install receivers in every truck and tank. Given the amount of eLoran activity overseas, such equipment should be readily available, the source suggested.

“There would be interest in eLoran equipment if there was a move to regenerate the eLoran infrastructure, starting I am sure with the suppliers overseas who are getting ready to support Korea and the (other eLoran countries), said another expert who has been following the issue. “It would happen here if the infrastructure were regenerated.”

eLoran supporters are hoping that even limited use of eLoran by the Pentagon will spark commercial interest and, eventually, participation by DoT and DHS. For example, if DoD were to develop a well-recognized signal specification, it would go a long way toward spurring the introduction of commercial eLoran-capable receivers. The money is there in the DoD budget to do these things, argued one source, in part because the amounts needed are so small.

That little bit of spending could make a big difference, though, by proving the practicality of the system, they said.

“You kind of have to coax the civil community,” said the source, who is familiar with the long-running debate over eLoran. The key to getting DoT and DHS onboard, they said, is the “ability to demonstrate it is not a budget buster.”

Private Sector Steps Up
And DoD does appear to be interested.

In November Goward, who as director for Marine Transportation Systems for the Coast Guard served as the United States’ maritime navigation authority for the United States, announced the formation of the RNT Foundation.

The group is proposing that the United States adopt eLoran and is suggesting that a public-private partnership could be established to provide the funding.

“We have had some positive responses to our proposal for a public-private partnership from the Department of Defense and the Department of Transportation,” said Goward, “and, so, we expect to be talking with them in the next couple of weeks. We’ll see where that goes.”

The proposal is similar to one submitted last year by UrsaNav, which is currently doing research at a number of the old Loran-C sites under a cooperative research and development agreement or CRADA with DHS. UrsaNav is a supporter of the RNT Foundation.

“We would want (the government) to contribute the existing infrastructure. ‘As is’ is fine,” Goward said. “And then, depending on the business model that they chose, they could either contribute a certain amount a year or a certain amount up front.”

If the federal government is going to get a direct benefit back from the system, he added, “we would hope they would contribute a little bit to the restoration of the system. If not, I suppose we would raise the funds ourselves and set it up as a purely fee-for-service business. There is a whole spectrum of possibility on how this could be funded.”

Sources confirmed that DoD officials were scheduled to have a preliminary meeting with Foundation representatives in January. The DoT said it had already been involved in meetings.

“The U.S. Department of Transportation and the other agencies have held preliminary discussions and are planning future high-level talks on GPS backup generally,” DoT said in a prepared statement, “but we don’t have a schedule of future talks at this time. USDOT’s role will continue to be to provide input on GPS requirements from the civil sector.”

Sources said that DoD reached out to the DHS in a letter sent as part of setting up the initial meetings. Goward believes DHS will participate in the discussion, althoughInside GNSS was unable to confirm that. DHS, which is often described as being responsible for finding a backup for GPS, did not respond to requests for comment.

Congress Turns Up the Heat
If the three agencies find themselves unable to work out a plan, however, Congress is ready to provide a measure of very pubic incentive.

The House Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee, chaired by Rep Duncan Hunter, R-California, has scheduled a February 4 hearing headlined “Finding Your Way: The Future of Federal Aids to Navigation.” A congressional staffer toldInside GNSS that eLoran may be one of the topics discussed. Indeed, although the full list of speakers was not public as of press time, Goward confirmed that he would be testifying.

Another topic that may come up is the negative findings in a GAO report on GPS vulnerability requested by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. The three have been following the eLoran issue and asked the Government Accountability Office to examine the risks and potential effects of GPS disruptions. GAO was also tasked with assessing whether DHS and DoT were living up to their responsibility to find mitigations for system problems and develop a backup for GPS.

The report, released last November, faulted DoT and DHS for their “limited progress” — progress hampered, in part, by a disagreement over which agency is responsible for developing a GPS backup system. If that is not enough to inspire action, the U.S. House and Senate have ordered the secretary of defense and the director of national intelligence to work with the National Research Council to study and determine options for responding to “near-term and long-term threats to the national security space systems of the United States.”

The mandate, which was imbedded in the National Defense Authorization Act for 2014 and signed into law at the end of December, gives them until the end of this year to recommend actions to counter the threats including, as an option, building in systemic resilience in some way.

They must describe, as part of the country’s Space Protection Strategy, how the two departments will provide “necessary national security capabilities — through alternative space, airborne, or ground systems — if a foreign actor degrades, denies access to, or destroys United States national security space capabilities” — a clear opportunity to address the need for a backup to GPS.

Dismantling of Loran Stations Continues
What Congress has failed to do, however, is stop the destruction of the old Loran-C sites, which are important to the potential success of a new eLoran network.

The Coast Guard continues to dismantle the old sites, taking down antennas and removing the ground equipment. Two towers were dismantled in December and another is scheduled to be taken down by the end of March, according to the Coast Guard.

Saving the existing sites is essential said Chuck Schue, who follows the developments closely as president and chief executive officer of UrsaNav, a provider of eLoran technology and services. The old sites can be put to use quickly to broadcast signals that could spark development of new receivers and help encourage the market for the service — which could ultimately save the federal government money.

The more the government dismantles the old sites the more it will cost to launch eLoran and the longer it will take, he said.

Dismantling the sites also prolongs the period during which American will be have only one source for timing and navigation data, said Goward. “We should not have so much depending on one source.”

eLoran supporters hope that DoD will ask the Coast Guard, which became part of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, to stop taking down the sites until a decision on eLoran can be made.

Although Schue said he believes DHS is participating in the talks, he thinks that officials representing the agency are not from the same part of DHS as the Coast Guard — possibly making it difficult to coordinate on saving the sites.

“It appears that one hand does not know what the other doing.”