Merkhet Solutions CEO Sam Matheny testified on June 4 before the House Communications and Technology Subcommittee at a hearing titled “Where Are We?: Examining Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Capabilities in the United States.”
The purpose of the longtime NAB executive? To promote the association’s efforts in the commercial deployment of the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS), which sees Matheny now leading a spinoff company dedicated to the commercialization of a GPS alternative.
Prior to his new role, Matheny spent 12 years as Chief Technology Officer at the NAB. With that experience behind him and his new role firmly in place, he testified at a hearing chaired by Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.). The goal? Convincing Congress that the “urgent need for resilient alternatives and complements to the Global Positioning System” involves Merkhet.
That entity’s mission? Deployment of BPS as the primary complementary PNT solution to enhance national and economic security. Matheny shared how BPS is a patented terrestrial timing and position technology that leverages existing high-power broadcast infrastructure and licensed spectrum already covering the United States.
“BPS was first conceived by my team at NAB in 2021, and you can think of it as the terrestrial equivalent of GPS,” he said. “Our nation’s economy and national security increasingly depend upon precise timing and positioning services delivered by GPS. Yet the United States has become dangerously overdependent on a single, contested signal from space that remains vulnerable to jamming, spoofing, cyberattacks and natural disruption. These risks endanger virtually every American critical infrastructure sector, including energy, telecommunications, data centers and financial services, where a disruption to precision time can trigger grid instability, network outages, and lost transactions. BPS has been designed to address this more than a billion dollar-a-day economic and national security risk by using our country’s extensive, existing broadcast infrastructure to serve as a reliable and equally effective terrestrial complement to GPS.”
For Matheny, BPS offers several advantages:
- First, the infrastructure is already in place. America’s local broadcasters currently operate resilient transmission facilities in every corner of the country.
- Second, BPS signals are transmitted at high power from tall towers in diverse locations. This makes BPS very difficult to jam or spoof at scale. This is unlike GPS signals, which operate on a relatively narrow band of spectrum and are weak when received on Earth, making local interference easier.
- Third, BPS uses existing licensed spectrum.
- Fourth, BPS supports unlimited simultaneous users. This means no bottlenecks, which is essential for emergency and critical infrastructure applications.
- Finally, BPS is independent of GPS and other global navigation satellite systems, functioning even when GPS is compromised. Beyond serving as a backup, this means BPS can be used to monitor the health of GPS.
BPS has been developed in collaboration with the U.S. government and critical infrastructure industries to ensure it can meet the needs of critical infrastructure, and it has already moved beyond concept, Matheny added, sharing how last year NIST concluded “BPS time transfer is comparable to or better than GPS, making BPS a viable complementary PNT solution when GPS is unavailable.”
Last year the Department of Transportation awarded NAB a contract to deploy a BPS field trial with critical infrastructure partner Dominion Energy. BPS has been installed at one of the largest substations on the East Coast and this trial has yielded impressive results thus far.
“BPS can strengthen national resilience, but speed and scale will require coordinated policy support,” Matheny said.
Congress can help in three practical ways, he concluded:
- First, Congress should help accelerate BPS installation and operations through funding for traceable time, station hardware, calibration and ongoing network operations and monitoring.
- Second, Congress should support and work with the Administration to help designate a lead agency to expedite the activation of BPS and other complements to GPS.
- Finally, Congress should encourage the Federal Communications Commission to complete the important work it has already initiated on ATSC 3.0. In addition to the significant benefits to television viewers, including upgraded picture and sound, and better emergency alerting, the full benefits of BPS cannot be harnessed until the FCC completes its work on the ATSC 3.0 transition.
“In conclusion, broadcasters have always served communities in moments of need. Through BPS, that public service can extend to directly protecting our critical infrastructure and enhancing our national security.”
— Reporting by RBR+TVBR in the National Capital Region
