The May 4-5 meeting of the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Advisory Board focused on its mantra to "protect, toughen and augment" (PTA) GPS. The meeting included three great presentations that bear directly on the A of that mantra. The electric grid used to be simpler: regional operators flowed power unidirectionally from stations to customers basing the load on past usage. Now, the grid is becoming a wide-area network-with regional inter-connects, multi-directional flows, and load based on real-time data and predictive analysis, requiring sensors time-synchronized within 1 microsecond from UTC. Yet, this critical infrastructure's timing applications depend entirely on vulnerable GPS technology.
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