World War II Tech eLoran Deployed As GPS Backup In the UK 139
hypnosec (2231454) writes General Lighthouse Authorities (GLA) has announced that they have deployed a World War II technology called Long Range Navigation system, which they have named eLoran, in seven ports across Britain to serve as a backup for the existing Global Positioning System (GPS). GLA notes that modern ships have a lot of equipment that rely on Global Navigation Satellite Systems for functioning and in case of failure the consequences will be disastrous. For this reason technology that doesn't rely on the GPS was required as a backup. eLoran is a ground-based system rather than satellite-based and is designed to be used in the event of a GPS failure. The system was quite successful and post-WWII era, the system was updated and crowned a new name Loran-C. The navigation system was adopted by mariners across the globe and was used until GPS was deployed. Loran has now been renamed as eLoran because of the upgrades to the technology as well as the infrastructure. The more accurate system generates longwave radio signal, which is 1 million times more powerful than those from positioning satellites, are capable of reaching inside buildings, underground and underwater. According to GLA, eLoran and GPS are quite different from one another and hence there is no common mode of failure.
Meanwhile, in the U.S. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Meanwhile, in the U.S. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Meanwhile, in the U.S. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Err - no. (Score:4, Insightful)
The primary risk to GPS in the UK is the USA deciding to turn it off.
That risk doesn't apply for US shipping near the US, as if GPS was turned off - rather than severely degraded - so would the local LORAN locators.
GPS is not going away unless someone actually presses the button.
It's not vulnerable (theoretically) to single points of failure (ideally) as it's intended to carry on even in the event of moderate wars.
Re:Err - no. (Score:5, Informative)
sorry but you are wrong - .....
From
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29758872
"
The system works using a fleet of satellites orbiting high above the Earth, but the signal they transmit is weak and can be easily interfered with.
Other sat-nav systems - such as Galileo in Europe and Glonass in Russia - have the same vulnerabilities, says Prof David Last from the Royal Institute of Navigation.
"A little bit of power from a jammer on the frequency used by GPS close to your receiver can deafen it, and it won't be able to hear the GPS signals," he says.
"For example, jamming is a real issue in Korea. There have now been three occasions when the North Koreans have transmitted high-powered jamming in South Korea."
The Sun too can knock satellite systems offline, he adds.
"It starts to transmit radio noise during solar storms, so intense that it either makes GPS positions wobble about or causes GPS to be lost across the entire sunlit side of the Earth."
"
Jamming (Score:2)
Re:Err - no. (Score:5, Interesting)
In the UK pilots often receive NOTAMs stating that the military are conducting GPS jamming trials in certain areas. From personal experience and reports from other pilots the jamming is very effective.
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or... The US decides to use the power it has with GPS to manipulate global markets by encrypting the signal or otherwise making it hard to use unless you comply with whatever nonsense the US wishes at the time. But hey, we'd never manipulate the global economy unfairly like that would we?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
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Would the US care? In the right situation - nope.
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Because doing that would never massively backfire.
When did our government ever think beyond the next election?
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Re: Err - no. (Score:3)
And the government always obeys the law? Further, if the facility exists, anyone can turn the jitter back on. It's no different from what we've been saying about backdoors - once they exist, anyone can use them. There's also risks of social engineering attacks against those running satellites. And, since no software is perfect (and no radiation proofing is perfect), the satellites may spontaneously add jitter, enable encryption (with a gibberish key), or simply activate their steering jets, putting them on
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Further, if the facility exists, anyone can turn the jitter back on. It's no different from what we've been saying about backdoors - once they exist, anyone can use them. There's also risks of social engineering attacks against those running satellites.
Satellites launched since 2000 (roughly half the current constellation) lack the necessary transmitters to rebroadcast the jitter, and currently slated replacement satellites will also lack that transmitter. If the federal government wanted to reintroduce the jitter, they would have to replace most of the constellation. At that point, it's pretty much no longer GPS.
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The system can be selectively disabled to prevent use in specific geographic areas. Those areas are fairly large but not global.
And if the decision was made to disable GPS in the US they would most assuredly turn off any local radionavigation system as well.
Re: Err - no. (Score:3)
The FBI wants to ban private encryption, essentially banning eCommerce, eBanking, UNIX, foreign languages, medical implants, boolean operators...
The mere fact that the director could state this in public and not be fired by the time he'd finished speaking is all the proof you need that Americans - and indeed any post-Babbage civilizations - are expendable in the eyes of the civil (uncouth?) service.
Which should be no surprise. The difference in social influences, culture and thus attitude between the parano
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Re: Meanwhile, in the U.S. (Score:2, Informative)
It's not only the US, Norway is also about to shut down the (old) LORAN-C system.
"The Department of Fisheries has desided to close down
the 4 Norwegian Loran-C stations from January 1. 2016.
Ther reason given is that there is not many users, the GPS is the
primary navigation system, and that the equipement in use
are old and need expensive uppgrade." source: home.online.no/~loran-c/
The US may still get eLoran (Score:2)
If the following blog post is worth anything, then maybe the USA will still go with eLoran as a backup:
http://www.panbo.com/archives/... [panbo.com]
The next question is how cheap is the most affordable eLoran receiver, and where can one be bought?
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Another way to look at it: Non-radio navigation continues to be possible, and constitutes a practical, cheap, already-in-use backup to GPS for most ship-related uses.
LORAN is fine and has valid uses. But it also has a cost, and taking it down doesn't meant that ships will get lost or crash into each should GPS become unavailable.
re Loran (Score:3, Interesting)
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HAM is not an acronym (Score:4, Funny)
How come slashdotters always write it as HAM? It's ham radio, not HAM. Despite rumors, it does not stand for Highly Antique Morse.
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re Loran (Score:2)
are you sure? (Score:3)
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The satellites are hardened.
And 20000km away from earth.
As are the uplinks. (well, not the latter)
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See that big ball of gas in the sky 93 million miles away, thats capable of taking out any satellite based system...
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But that's natural. Mother nature would never do that to us.
(Sings 'kumbaya'.)
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GPS can be cryptographically authenticated, at least for authorized users. You can jam it, but you can't easily fake it, at least not against receivers that are worried about such things.
Re: are you sure? (Score:3)
That may be true in theory, but Iran succeeded in hijacking a US drone via a GPS attack. Thus, whatever authentication exists is not actually in use. The US, for reasons known only to them, hate encryption. Any encryption. By anyone. Including themselves. For much of the war in Afghanistan, drone camera signals were unencrypted and omnidirectional, leading to video footage being circulated. Slashdot covered the issue in the early days of the war.
If the US military are too stupid to encrypt drone GPS systems
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The common failure mode would be "electronics" and any type of electronic navigation would fall under that. Furthermore, if all a ship's electronics are offline their engines are probably not functioning either.
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If that happened you'd probably have more important shit to worry about.
Kinetic Kill Vehicle (Score:3, Interesting)
Please understand that the technology to kill satelites has been around for a long time. Several military contractors for the US Defense Department have developed kinetic kill vehicles. They are in orbit as we speak. Their purpose is to destroy satelites by ramming into them at high velocity. They are like an anvil with a guidance system and a simple propulsion system. I know that Boeing had these back in the early 1990s. I'm sure there are hundreds or thousands of them up there by now with their targets lo
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With the GPS sats at a distance of 20k kilometers, you'd have plenty of warning to bomb the shit out of the attacking country before the kill vehicles could even approach the satellites.
I never said that the first attack would be the satelites, but it very well may be. How much warning do you have when the KKV is already in orbit? All it has to do is change orbit slightly and your satelite is dead. Also, you suggest that a state would use nukes before their satelites are taken out. I don't agree. Whether you agree or not with the concept of MAD (mutually assured destruction), it is clear that the major nuclear powers do. It is quite conceivable that there could be a conventional conflict t
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How much warning do you have when the KKV is already in orbit? All it has to do is change orbit slightly and your satelite is dead.
How do you "change an orbit slightly" from LEO to a GPS orbit? By using the Picard manouever?
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Re: Kinetic Kill Vehicle (Score:2)
A dark satellite made from an ultrablack material or using a stealthy topology simply isn't going to be seen. By anyone.
Ion engines are slow, but they don't give off any tell-tale glare.
The southern hemisphere has very little in the way of monitoring - a satellite traversing any great circle other than equatorial will be difficult-to-impossible to track.
This is not a likely threat, on a scale from one to ten, the seriousness is sqrt(-1). Nonetheless, it's not zero.
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There are also (far less expensive) anti-satellite missiles that a fighter can launch from high altitude to kill sats in low orbits. Geosync orbit is pretty safe, but GPS sats orbit much lower.
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No common mode of failure? An EMP or nuke would beg to differ.
I'm sorry, if there's a nuke going off and you're on a cargo ship the last thing in the world you're going to worry about is getting your containers where they belong.
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If an EMP or Nuke went off close enough to knock out this system, the loss of computerize navigation would be the least of your concerns. I'm pretty sure ship captains would turn around and avoid England irreverent of the state of navigation.
are you sure? (Score:4, Informative)
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"What a retard"
Yes, the generic Space Nutter point of view I'm lambasting is quite retarded, yes.
So how did they have a positioning system before Sputnik?
Loran isn't nearly as convenient as GPS. Since it's longwave (relatively low frequency radio waves) it needs longer antennas. It needs powerful ground stations within (IIRC) a thousand miles or so. It would be hard to put in your cell phone.
The other competitor* in the 'where the heck am I' competition is solar or celestial navigation (think sextant and a nice, accurate watch). Simple tech, although I can't see teaching people in Starbucks how to use a sextant (it helps if you are outside and can see th
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"sextant and a nice, accurate watch... it helps if you are outside and can see the horizon": In fact, the "true" horizon, which is almost never the case on land, except at the shore. (Of course, the OP is about ship navigation, so I'm being a bit pedantic.) Celestial navigation also involves several books of data, a large pad of paper, and a pencil with an eraser. Although I hear there are other ways to do the calculation now...
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I think YOU are confused, how much energy does it take to build these satellites and put them into their orbits? THAT's what I'm talking about!
If a long-wave LORAN transmitter with mere 1 MW of RF output power (usually, it's more) could replace a microwave sat with 25 W of output RF power, then the equivalent energy needed for running that LORAN transmitter for the projected GPS sat lifespan of 7.5 years is equivalent to burning almost 6000 tons of kerosene, without taking the electricity generation efficiency into consideration. Quite optimistically, the corrected figure would be somewhere around 12000 tons. And the 7.5 figure is for the old sats
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You still haven't built the rocket. We can make electricity by damming rivers.
And you can use that electricity for manufacturing the rocket. So what? Everything's OK, it seems.
Technology gets better, remember?
So does rocket technology.
We can make more sensitive receivers!
But you're still stuck with large gear for longer wavelength reception if you want to make it work for maritime applications (and flying over most of the oceans). And even a lot of the Earth's land surface (Siberia, Sahara, Antarctica...) So now you have two different high-energy systems to maintain instead of one low-energy one (save for the odd launch here and there). Yummy.
We can make solar power assisted transmitter towers! You can't make solar power assisted rocket launches.
Actually,
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Re: Wait wait wait (Score:2)
The Viking version was the sunstone, which was not much bigger than an old-fashioned pocket watch.
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good to have backups (Score:2, Interesting)
In the event of a war with a major world power, GPS will be destroyed, because most of those powers have proven they can shoot satellites. If you depend too much on GPS you will be in for a rude shock when it goes away.
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The GPS satellites are in pretty high orbits (around 20000km if memory serves). I don't know if anybody has an anti-satellite weapon that can target a satellite that high. For that matter, the WAAS satellites are in geosynchronous orbit and even harder to shoot down.
You would also have to shoot down several GPS satellites in quick succession to produce a significant gap in coverage. Since the Chinese and Russian anti-satellite weapons are based on orbital launchers (for obvious reasons) the countries in
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I don't think either Iran or North Korea has the launch capacity to put the 1000+kg that they would need to put a nuke into orbit.
Agreed that a nuke in LEO would play merry hell with GPS and lots of other satellites. But I can't really see North Korea or Iran being crazy or stupid enough to piss off their remaining allies (or sort-of-allies) like China or Russia. Of course, we are talking about North Korea and Iran...
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Every major power depends on international trade to the extent that if they're trying to take down the GPS, the world is already doomed.
US Navy still using sextant and chronometer (Score:4, Interesting)
good to have backups (Score:2)
Jamming and spoofing are the much bigger threats.
Pretty cool (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not your old 70's LORAN system. Thanks to advances in DSP processing, eLORAN gives your position with precision comparable to GPS (10m or so). It also have data channel that's used to broadcast DGPS corrections, so it complements GPS nicely.
Because of low frequency, signal penetrates buildings and ground (however with greatly reduced range). This may be one of the solutions for a car navigation in tunels. Even if it produces less precise position, it's always better than no position at all.
Great contrast between UK and USA, where LORAN transmitters were demolished in the past years. When so many things dependd on GPS signals, we really need some backup system for precise timing and positioning. Not thinking about backup only means we will learn about it the hard way - and it will not be pretty.
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Not thinking about backup only means we will learn about it the hard way - and it will not be pretty.
Exactly. Every major world power has plans to destroy the American GPS constellation in the event of a shooting war. If you don't plan for that, it will be that much rougher when it happens.
Wars with minor or regional powers that can't destroy GPS, that's one thing. Wars with major powers like China or Russia who can, that's something else.
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I am waiting for the Perestroïka navigation system : )
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Even in the 70s LORAN could give 10' accuracy.
You just used it with hyperbolic geometry instead of in range-range mode.
The two problems with hyperolic is that you needed at least 3 stations to get a position, range-range could get your position with two.
For GPS, you need 4 satellites to get a 3D position (needed for flying), 3 would get you a 2D position (Ok if you know you are on the ground...)
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You could determine your 3D position with three satellites if you had an atomic clock. Since you don't, you need a fourth satellite to solve for four unknowns: x, y, z, and time.
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Thing is today a chip scale cesium atomic clock with inputs for synchronization to GPS is under 2000USD and the size of a box of matches. So it is perfectly possible.
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We need a solution to car navigation in tunnels? You just continue straight ahead until you emerge from the tunnel.
There are places in the world that have intersecting tunnels... [youtube.com]
Re: LMFAO (Score:1)
We have lived thousands of years without electricity so a global power outage shouldn't be a problem
Re:LMFAO (Score:4, Interesting)
in case of failure the consequences will be disastrous
Yeah, because no shipping ever occurred before LORAN or GPS. What a joke! It's not like people found their way around the globe for centuries using the sun, moon and stars.
Actually, we HAVEN'T been shipping super sized cargo ships without at least LORAN. The need for near continuous, weather independent localization pretty much coincided with the development of radio. We COULD develop different back up systems - for example inertial navigation systems have progressed from refrigerator sized boxes with a price tag suitable only for military ships to a shoebox sized box priced reasonably for a multi million dollar freighter. Subsequent improvement could probably decrease the size and cost but I doubt it would get to GPS sized dimensions - if only for the fact that the frequency requires longer antennas.
And remember, a-Loran, b-Loran, c-Loran and e-Loran require multiple, expensive ground stations. We are all waiting to see what i-Loran will require, probably just some pixie dust and a persistent connection to i-cloud, but Apple hasn't weighed in with their plans just yet.
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Yeah, well, GPS, GLONAS and GALILEO all require multiple, expensive satellites and ground stations too. I'm pretty sure eLORAN will be an order of magnitude cheaper.
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Besides LORAN-C, there used to be another low frequency radio navigation system even better suited for global shipping: Omega. It operated on e
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Shipping used to be a ridiculously dangerous thing. The navigator on a ship was probably one of the most skilled crew members, and if he fucked up, you were done.
I honestly believe even if we did still have that skill set, if you applied old techniques to the scale of modern shipping, it would indeed be catastrophic, and not just for those at sea.
The world now depends on international shipping. Sure, things could be re-juggled (our food didn't always spend half it's time floating across the sea from cheaper
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Yeah, because no shipping ever occurred before LORAN or GPS. What a joke! It's not like people found their way around the globe for centuries using the sun, moon and stars.
Sure, if a precision of 1 nautical mile (1852 meters) is good enough for you, with fixes only possible at certain times of the day. Celestial navigation is not going to keep your 200 foot beam supertanker in the middle of a 500 foot shipping channel in the middle of the day. That's like treading a needle, only you thread ways a half million tons and is traveling at 19 miles/hour.
"WWII tech" (Score:5, Informative)
In case anyone is intersted, this slideset gives a nice overview of this "WWII tech".
http://www.ursanav.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/news/UrsaNav%20ILA-40%20eLoran%20System%20Definition%20%26%20Signal%20Specification%20Tutorial.pdf [ursanav.com]
eLoran security... (Score:1)
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Contrast (Score:3)
Nice to know the grown-ups are in charge of strategic planning in the UK. Contrast the no-intellect kiddies and political scum in the USA. Congress passed an appropriation in 2008 to implement eLORAN, but some puffed-up asshat in the executive branch zeroed out the funding and nobody ever followed through.
For civilian purposes, non-space-based is right. (Score:2)
no common mode of failure? (Score:1)
Um.. electricity? Without it, pray for clear skies, a sextant, and knowledge how to use it.
Am I the only one? (Score:3)
I read the title as "World War II Tech DeLorean Deployed As GPS Backup In the UK".
Followed by "They had time travel in WW2?"
In unrelated news... (Score:2)
... announced that they have deployed a World War II technology called Long Range Navigation system, ...
Good to keep that going (Score:2)
It's not "WW II", technology, it's late 1950s LORAN-C technology. LORAN-A was WWII. It's good to have this as a backup. Many aircraft still have LORAN-C receivers. It's good enough to find an airport.
Yeah like VHF multilateration (Score:2)
Its used in Australia as well, in parallel with GPS and radar. The aircraft transmits a signal, and multiple ground stations compare the arrival time.
GLA... (Score:2)
I was thinking of Global Liberation Army from Command & Conquer: Generals (C&C:G) [ea.com]. :P
Its not exaxtly how it started... (Score:1)
In Britain in world war 2, aircraft would fly hundreds of miles using dead reckoning (initial position, compass direction, airspeed, wind direction). If anything changed, or you had to do maneuvers to protect life and limb, you may lose track of time/distance/direction. Its bad to lose a plane because 'lost, tried flying home, crashed in ocean' or 'lost, tried flying home, had to crash behind enemy lines'. So they had two low frequency long range beacons: Cat and Mouse. Mouse was in Northern Scotland an
I love GPS but ... (Score:3)
GPS L1C signal have 60W (a few times more on newer GPS sats) of power being irradiated by the antenna. By the same that signal travels 18000Km to the ground its down to miliwatts, in fact so weak that a one watt transmitter one Km away can still overpower the original signal. A 1 watt jammer can fit in your pocket. A 100 Watt jammer (no more than the size of a suitcase) can jam GPS for a hundred Kms easily.
GPS works great as long as its not jammed. And the dangers are far worst when there's a signal being spoofed (artificially sending a signal that looks genuine, but has the wrong parameters, potentially leading to aircraft crashes, banking transactions recorded with the wrong timestamp, shutting down celullar towers, leading people to the wrong locationto name just one of the dozens of life threatening scenarios).
eLoran is the only solution that can actually compliment GPS, providing it with a signal of similar accuracy to GPS L1C that can be received without line of sight to the antenna transmitting the signal 1000 Km away from the antenna.
In my opinion destroying the Loran-C towers was the single worst decision the Obama administration made. The Loran-C signal was worthless, but the towers and adjacent building could have been shutdown and then repurposed to transmit eLoran.
Is LORAN-C Truly Dead (Score:1)
The Seneca LORAN-C station in upstate NY between Rochester and Syracuse, while silent, didn't destroy it's tower or buildings - instead it was taken down one section at a time - and is stacked neatly in the parking lot. Wonder if it's simply been mothballed in case they need to reactivate the system?
http://tinyurl.com/senecaloran [tinyurl.com]
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There is one switch in the US which will disable the whole system. GPS works badly for aircraft because they change altitude. Most users have a fixed altitude, so a small degradation in the system can cause large positional errors.
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I'm not sure how GPS can fail? There are like 26 or so satellites over the earth. I can't imagine all 26 of them going down all at once?
For starters you need to be able to receive from at LEAST three of them simultaneously or they might as well not be up there.
There are 26 because some will be on the wrong side of the Earth, or below the horizon, or behind a building, mountain, or thick cloud. Lose a few and you have times when you can't hear at least three that well separated from your viewpoint, so you