LAS VEGAS—The National Association of Broadcasters, Sinclair Broadcast Group and UrsaNav have announced that they will demonstrate a complementary system that could provide a backup to the Global Positioning System if GPS is compromised or attacked.
The demo comes at a time when the FCC has announced an effort to find alternatives to the current GPS system, which is crucial to many technologies and the U.S. economy, but is vulnerable to disruption or attack, with tremendous economic consequences.
In announcing the demo, the partners explained that one economic study suggested that GPS generated roughly $1.4 trillion in economic benefits to the private sector through 2017 in the U.S. alone; another study puts the economic loss from a single day of GPS failure at $1.6 billion, and the loss from a month of failure at $58.2 billion.
During the show, the NAB, Sinclair, and UrsaNav will demonstrate an alternative timing capability using the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS) and eLoran as a fully terrestrial solution to complement existing GPS services.
BPS, a technology developed by NAB, is enabled by ATSC 3.0, or NextGen TV, and its adoption as an alternative could provide an important use case for the deployment and use of 3.0 broadcasts.
As previously reported, BPS can readily be deployed using broadcasters’ existing infrastructure and spectrum as soon as broadcasters complete the nationwide transition to ATSC 3.0. BPS is one of many features made possible with the adoption of ATSC 3.0.
eLoran is an advanced Position, Navigation, and Timing solution evolving from the long line of Loran technologies that were initially developed by the U.S. Department of Defense and the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence, the backers of the demo explained.
Together, these technologies can provide a robust alternative precision timing capability in the event of GPS being compromised.
The demonstration will take place during show floor hours at Futures Park (Booth 4042) in the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center at NAB Show. There will also be a panel discussion with the participants at 11:45 a.m. on Saturday, April 5 in room W222-W223 as part of NAB’s Broadcast Engineering and IT Conference.
“Broadcasters have long been essential to public safety, and today we’re proving that role is more important than ever,” said NAB Executive vice president, technology and chief technology officer Sam Matheny. “Through technologies like the Broadcast Positioning System, enabled by ATSC 3.0, broadcasters can deliver a resilient solution to support America’s critical infrastructure in the face of growing threats to GPS. Combining BPS with eLoran provides a resilient, frequency diverse, and wholly terrestrial alternative to GPS. We are proud to partner with Sinclair and UrsaNav to demonstrate how broadcasters’ innovation can help safeguard the systems that keep our economy running.”
Del Parks, Sinclair’s president of technology, added that “GPS vulnerability is a trillion-dollar problem in the U.S. economy. Broadcasters can use their existing infrastructure and spectrum to solve this problem. We are excited to demonstrate how BPS can help secure the U.S. economy if broadcasters can move forward with a complete and expeditious transition to ATSC 3.0.”
“We should ask ourselves why China and Russia continue to operate and upgrade Loran systems that interoperate with their own Global Navigation Satellite Systems, BeiDou and GLONASS, and why other nations in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East are doing so as well,” said Charles Schue, UrsaNav’s CEO. “The answer is easy: eLoran provides a sovereign and survivable terrestrial PNT solution wirelessly over continent-wide areas that ensures the safety and security of citizens and infrastructure when GPS/GNSS is not available or trustworthy. eLoran and BPS are proven technologies that operate within already licensed spectrum. When paired, they provide a layered PNT alternative to metropolitan and remote users.”
