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Forget eyeballs and radar! Brits tackle GPS jammers with WWII technology

Claim: 'If you don't have eLoran, you're dead in the water'

Navigation technology developed during World War Two has been deployed to run a network of longwave transmitters as a GPS backup in parts of England and Scotland.

As of Friday, the eLoran system had been switched on along the east coast at seven ports. It is expected to cover all of the British Isles by 2020.

Quangocrats who run the UK's lighthouses and navigational-aids infrastructure lobbied for government cash for years to get eLoran up and running, after demonstrating questionable issues with GPS jammers being used against ships in 2010.

The General Lighthouse Authorities of the UK and Ireland announced that the tech had in fact been installed at the Port of Dover in January 2013.

But news of eLoran has now reached the BBC, after the GLA deployed the system to six other ports across Blighty.

Rather alarmingly, GLA research and radio navigation manager Martin Bransby claimed to the Beeb:

All vessels that sail today are massively dependent on GPS. It is their primary means of navigation – and a massive number of instruments rely on it too.

If you don't have it, you are dead in the water.

The Register's Lewis Page has previously skewered some of the GLA's findings here and here. ®

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