BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of
jeffgeerling.com

Right now it's in the experimental stage, with only 6 towers total deployed (only 5 were operational during NAB, and only one in Nevada... so timing, not navigation yet).

The ultimate plan—which is probably dependent on how well ATSC 3.0 rolls out (which has plenty of hurdles[1])—is to encourage broadcasters to add on the necessary timing equipment to their transmitter sites, to build a mesh network for timing.

That would allow the system to be 100% independent of GPS (time transfer could be done via dark fiber and/or ground-satellite-ground directly to some 'master' sites).

The advantages for BPS are coverage (somewhat) inside buildings, the ability to have line of sight nearly everywhere in populated areas, and resilience to jamming you can't get with GPS (a 100 kW transmitter signal 10 miles away is a lot harder to defeat than a weak GPS signal hundreds of miles away in the sky).

The demo on the show floor was also using eLoran to distribute time from a site in Nevada to the transmitter facility on Black Mountain outside Vegas, showing a way to be fully GPS-independent (though the current eLoran timing was sourced from GPS).

[1] ATSC 3.0, as it is being rolled out in the US, doesn't even add on 4K (just 1080p HDR), and tacks on 'features' like 'show replay' (where you tap a button and an app can stream a show you're watching on OTA TV through the Internet... amazing! /s), DRM (at stations' discretion, ugh), and 'personalized ad injection' (no doubt requiring you to connect your TV to the Internet so advertisers can get your precise location too...). Because ATSC 3.0 requires new hardware, consumers have to be motivated to buy new TVs or converter boxes—I don't see anything that motivates me to do so. I feel like it may be a lot like the (forever ongoing) HD Radio rollout.

Another domain where that is true involves logic analyzers. A few years ago, on a bit of a lark, I bought a (used) fairly high-end Keysight logic analyzer. The kind of thing that cost like $20,000 or more when it was brand new. But I got a sweet deal on it, so I bought it. Only... it came with no test leads. And then I started shopping for the leads.

Yikes.

I forget the exact numbers now, but as best as I can recall, the leads came in 64pin sets, where the device supported up to 4 test lead sets, for 256 total channels. And just one of the 64pin test lead sets cost something like $1500. So a full set would cost another $6000 on top of the device itself. I think that was about what I paid for the analyzer itself in the first place!

Now I don't regret buying it and in truth I never needed to use 256 channels anyway, so I only bought 1 of the test lead sets so far. But yeah... test leads / cables /etc. for high bandwidth / low latency / high frequency applications get pretty damn expensive.