DECCA NAVIGATOR CLOSURE ENDS AN ERA After more than 50 years of providing radio positioning for mariners and

aviators, the Decca Navigator system ceased to operate at midnight on March 31. The occasion was marked earlier that week by a farewell conference at Church House in London where users and pioneers of the system met to review the development of the technology and their experiences of its benefits. During its lifetime the name Decca became a piece of nautical terminology that epitomised security and dependability. At its peak there were chains in all of the principal shipping areas of the world and an estimated 200,000 Decca users in Europe alone. By measuring the differences in signals received from transmitters along many of the world's coastlines, mariners and aviators were able to establish their positions with a degree of accuracy and consistency previously considered impossible. The advent of GPS navigation satellites eventually made the service superfluous and the General Lighthouse Authority, which had been funding Racal to maintain and operate the Decca chains, finally ended its support on March 31. Speaking at the conference, Stephen Clark, director for Racal Tracs, said: "It is always sad when something good, that so many people had worked so hard to create, comes to an end. Decca Navigator was a huge success in its day but life moves on. Satellite positioning is with us now and happily Racal has not lost its lead. The company has built-on its long experience to create the next generation of positioning technology. "Racal was the first company to offer a commercial Differential GPS (DGPS) service and the rest of the world followed us. Earlier this month we took the industry another major step forward when we announced a new Long Range RTK Differential GPS service. This enables our customers to know their position, accurate to within 20 centimetres, when they are up to 800 km from the shore. Nothing like this has been achieved before and we believe that it is a clear indication of our intention to remain as the world leader in precise positioning technology." Despite the free availability of GPS positioning, the withdrawal of the Decca service is still regretted by some sectors of the maritime industry. Most notably, fishermen valued Decca's ability to guide them back to fishing spots at sea with a degree of precision that is only available now through the more advanced Differential GPS services. Other sectors of the maritime community regret the loss of a positioning service that is totally independent. The Decca Navigator system was first used in June 1944 when it was employed to guide ships leading the D-Day invasion through the huge mine field that protected the north coast of France. The difficulty of navigating a minesweeper in action across the English Channel and making a precise landfall at night was considered impossible without some form of radio navigation. The first Decca chain was therefore established on the south coast of England and began transmitting on the day before the invasion force landed. Had a radio navigation service not been available it is now believed that the D-Day invasion would have had to follow a completely different plan. In 1945 the Decca service first became commercially available to users who would hire a receiver from the Decca Navigator company. By the early 1980s the widespread availability of low-cost microprocessors made inexpensive Decca receivers available for purchase. The loss of rental revenue caused Racal Electronics, which by then had acquired Decca Navigator, to inform the government that it could no longer afford to operate the system without financial support. From then onwards the Decca Navigator Service was funded by the General Lighthouses Authority (GLA) and Racal continued to operate it on the Authority's behalf. In 1992 an agreement was signed between the GLA and Racal-Decca Marine Navigation Ltd that the 18 Decca stations that had not already been modernised would be updated to reduce operating costs. This multi-million pound investment was completed by Racal in June 1994 by which time the entire system had been fully automated. Large buildings filled with valve technology transmitter equipment built in the 1960s were replaced by automated solid state units housed in small transportable containers. A new Supercontrol centre was opened in Edinburgh from which the entire UK Decca system could be monitored. Staff numbers were reduced from 64 to 19 and running costs were reduced by 40%. Despite the system operating within its reduced budget and successfully maintaining Decca Navigator's 99.95% performance reliability, the writing was on the wall for the service. During 1999 the GLA announced the final shut down of the service on March 31, 2000 following over 50 years of successful operation. Racal is acknowledged as a world-leader in tracking and positioning technology. The company manufactures a range of tracking systems able to monitor the position of personnel, vessels, vehicles or aircraft to within a few feet worldwide. Racal systems are currently in use in a variety of safety at sea, fisheries and transportation projects. Applications include the tracking of Icelandic and Moroccan fishing fleets on behalf of the relevant Governments, through to the monitoring of ships operating in the oil fields of Brunei and the North Sea. In the air, Racal monitors aircraft on behalf of companies such as British Airways, whilst on land, the company provides tracking services for a host of applications from land seismic vehicles in the USA through to trains, taxis and lorry fleets in Europe.

Wheelhouse Project - Decca Navigator Radio direction finding had been widely used at sea from the time of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, although even with a skilled operator its accuracy was limited. Radio Direction Finder loop aerials are affected by their surroundings, 'night effect' changed the angle at which the signal arrived, and refraction at the coastline all gave problems. It also depended on the operator's ability to measure the angle the signal arrives at. Thus a bearing was inherently less accurate as distance increased. WW2 changed everything as the Royal Navy needed to position its ships to within about 20 yds, even at night or in thick fog. In 1941 a radio method of accurate position fixing was proposed by the Decca Company in which a phase tracking receiver on the ship could determine its position relative to a chain of four special land based transmitters. The system was conceived by an American, William J O'Brien. It was used initially during the invasion of Europe in 1944 and may be described as a medium range hyperbolic system operating between 70 and 130 kHz. The frequency of all the transmitters in each chain are locked together in a coherent way giving rise to hyperbolic lines of position. There were over fifty eight chains covering the UK, mainland Europe and other parts of the world. The receiver presents the lane identifier and the relative phase of four channels on the 'Decometers' shown in the display unit above. The navigator obtains a fix by referring these values to a special chart on which a hyperbolic lattice is overprinted; a quick and simple operation.

Decometer After the war the system came into civilian use and it was adopted quickly by the fishing industry, it revolutionised every aspect of navigation. The above example shows the indicator unit of the Decca Navigator equipment as widely fitted to fishing vessels. Although now superseded by satellite navigation, it gave 50 years of good service to navigators around the long coastline of the UK and mainland Europe; it closed down in March 2000 leaving a fine mark on our maritime history of technology. The picture below shows the complicated Mk 12 receiver opened as it would have been for adjustment or repair. The three circuit modules are hinged at the bottom to allow access by the service engineer, the left hand module has been lowered revealing the four receiver channels. The two other modules contain the timing and phase comparison circuits.