Posted by Jon on January 30, 2010 at 18:32:12 user Jon.
In Reply to: GPS make lighthouses redundant posted by Robin Marshall on January 30, 2010 at 12:33:05:
The US is on the verge of turning off LORAN-C for much the same (flawed) reasons. Many of the geospatial newsletters are opposing the discontinuance of what's essentially a separate navigational aid that won't be affected by outages to the NavStar (what the US GPS system is called) constellation. The European (Galileo, whenever it becomes operational) and Russian (GloNASS, which doesn't have a full constellation deployed even yet) systems are vulnerable to much the same threats as the NavStar system is. Neither LORAN-C nor physical lighthouses/lightships would be imperiled by a threat that could render GPS inoperable.