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BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#21

Post by lxgr »

High-power, and ideally authenticated, alternatives to space-based GNSS are desperately needed, given the sharp uptick in jamming and spoofing incidents in many places.

In a true "end of history" moment, the US and other NATO members discontinued both of their ground-based systems (which are inherently harder to jam due to their much higher transmission power, since transmitters are not power limited) – Omega in the late 1990s and Loran-C in the early 2010s – in favor of GPS, while Russia kept their equivalent functional, and China completed an eLoran network last year.

Add to that the FAA's reduction of their ground-based VOR/DME station network that lets planes navigate when GPS is unavailable...

GPS jamming, and much more concerningly spoofing, will probably quickly come within reach of non-nation-states and smaller groups of all kinds, and ultimately individual actors, and that can't possibly end well for civil aviation if robust countermeasures don't become available very soon.

Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#22

Post by jandrese »

jen729w wrote: post #11
publicola1990 wrote: post #10

While this is is interesting, the "nobody's heard of" phrase is rather condescending and such phrases leave a bad taste in the mind.

Hmm it's just a turn of phrase. I would bet you $100 that no more than 0.001% of the population have heard of BPS. I hadn't. That's functionally "nobody".

The title is still clickbait given the reason nobody has heard of it is that it barely exists and is not useful yet.

Also, it smelled a bit like wishful thinking to assume the high precision clock would not be driven by GPS on real world deployments. I know some cell towers synchronize via PTP, but a great many others use GPS as their time source.

Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#24

Post by kristopolous »

geerlingguy wrote: post #19
kristopolous wrote: post #17

https://www.nab.org/bps/ for people who don't want to watch videos

The OP link is a blog post, which includes links out to the primary resources (much more in depth than the BPS landing page). The video is a byproduct of my conversations at NAB, and both are just preliminary... I've been working on a more in depth look at GPS and BPS (and other alternatives).

I'm fighting through a cold so granted my reading comprehension is way down but at least in my diminished state I was reading through that and was baffled ...

I'm sure the average reader who deals with broadcast signal electronics knows what's going on here but I just walked away from it confused. It looks like terrestrial broadcasters sending out time codes for triangulation?

Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#25

Post by chipsa »

fortran77 wrote: post #2

A alternative, but only for timing and as GPS supplement. Unless you’re in a place where you can pick up 4 ATSC transmitters at different locations you won’t get position or navigation with it.

So if you can get more than 3 different TV stations you should be good. Most stations don’t share transmission towers, AFAIK.

There are places, especially in the mountains where you don’t get the requisite number of towers, but large portions of the US will, and the required signal to noise ratio is better than to decode regular TV signals, so you have a larger area covered than for TV.

Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#28

Post by geerlingguy »

jandrese wrote: post #22
jen729w wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm it's just a turn of phrase. I would bet you $100 that no more than 0.001% of the population have heard of BPS. I hadn't. That's functionally "nobody".

The title is still clickbait given the reason nobody has heard of it is that it barely exists and is not useful yet. Also, it smelled a bit like wishful thinking to assume the high precision clock would not be driven by GPS on real world deployments. I know some cell towers synchronize via PTP, but a great many others use GPS as their time source.

For anyone who deploys GPS-based timing systems at scale, having more sources of precise time is a huge boon. (Some companies pay many millions for dark fiber just to have a redundant time source).

Holdover can only help so much, if there's a persistent jamming effort, it can wreak havoc on many time-critical systems.

Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#29

Post by m463 »

Lammy wrote: post #15

I hope it will still be possible to receive a BPS timing signal privately and anonymously with ATSC 3 like one can with GPS. ATSC 3 has the Dedicated Return Channel because marketers “““need””” to spy on every-fucking-thing we do: https://www.atsc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/A323-2024-04... “Conventional linear TV services alone (albeit ultra-high-definition) may not be sufficient to sustain the terrestrial broadc…

Just like 5G, which provides unexpected connectivity for IoT devices.

Search for "miot" or "mmtc"

Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#30

Post by gblargg »

kristopolous wrote: post #24
geerlingguy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP link is a blog post, which includes links out to the primary resources (much more in depth than the BPS landing page). The video is a byproduct of my conversations at NAB, and both are just preliminary... I've been working on a more in depth look at GPS and BPS (and other alternatives).

I'm fighting through a cold so granted my reading comprehension is way down but at least in my diminished state I was reading through that and was baffled ... I'm sure the average reader who deals with broadcast signal electronics knows what's going on here but I just walked away from it confused. It looks like terrestrial broadcasters sending out time codes for triangulation?

I was amazed to not even find a Wikipedia article about BPS.
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