Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!pacbell.com!ucsd!ucbvax!MANTA.NOSC.MIL!budden
From: budden@MANTA.NOSC.MIL (Rex A. Buddenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.time.ntp
Subject: Re:  Re:  'time' for war
Message-ID: <9101181500.AA14475@manta.nosc.mil>
Date: 18 Jan 91 15:00:37 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: inet
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 20

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I have no specific facts on the two Saudi chains, but all Loran systems
are timed more or less the same.  There are about three issues herein:
 - all Loran systems that I know anything about use UTC as the time reference.
So, while I don't have words in writing that say that, I'm sure it's a safe
bet that those chains use UTC.
 - within the chain, the Saudi systems are 'Time of Transmission' systems.
This means that each station is independently clocked to UTC and the system
does not respond to conductivity changes.  By contrast, the Coast Guard
systems are all 'time delay' or 'system area monitor' systems where we latch
the master to UTC but adjust the secondaries back and forth in time to provide
stable time delay characteristics 'in the center of the coverage area' which
translates to 'where we locate the monitor'.
 - in reality, the two systems don't have a whole lot of difference from the
time receiver point of view -- we can estimate it as less than a usec in
almost all real instances with real loran systems.  And much less in all-salt-
water paths.

b
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