Interest in the Broadcast Positioning System, or BPS—a relatively new offshoot of the ATSC 3.0 standard—continues to grow, sparking the creation of of a new company tasked with developing the technology for commercial deployments.
In addition to their regular services, broadcasters that have adopted ATSC 3.0 can also deploy BPS by transmitting very precise timing signals. The BPS signals are received and decoded similarly to satellite-delivered global positioning system (GPS) signals (also referred to as “Global Navigation Satellite System” or GNSS signals), and may be used to pinpoint the receiver’s geographic location and as a highly accurate time reference.
Too Many Eggs in One Basket
An obvious question about the development and rollout of such an alternative to the long-established GPS technology is: Why is it needed? Doesn’t GPS function well enough in most applications?
The answer lies in the dependency upon GPS signals that now exists among many business sectors and industrial operations. These extend far beyond vehicular navigation.
GPS has become an invisible utility that provides precision time to U.S. critical infrastructure, so much so that the National Security Council describes it as a single point of failure, with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) estimating the risk to the U.S. economy exceeding $1 billion per day, according to Sam Matheny, formerly executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters’ Broadcast Positioning System group and now CEO of Merkhet Solutions, an independent company launched by NAB in June.
“Critical infrastructure includes the energy grid, communications networks, financial and data centers—the infrastructure that undergirds every facet of modern life,” Matheny said.
Harvey Arnold, senior vice president of engineering at Sinclair, which has been working with the NAB to develop BPS, said GPS delivery of timing information is very much a “single thread” with no place to go should that thread break.
“As time goes on, you hear more and more about GPS’s lack of resiliency,” Arnold said. “GPS transfers time, not just positional information. This time-transfer function is very important.”
As GPS relies on reception of relatively weak signals from orbiting satellites, he noted, it is especially vulnerable to blocking or jamming—intentional or otherwise—from stronger terrestrial RF sources.
“People don’t pay much attention to how easy it is to jam or ‘spoof’ GPS signals,” Arnold said. “However, this can affect such things as financial transactions, which require accurate time stamps. It’s after jamming or spoofing attacks that people get excited.
“GPS has become the ‘gold standard’ for time transfer,” he continued. “It’s ubiquitous, but it’s a weak signal that’s subject to jamming and spoofing. Even space junk has the potential to disrupt it. Such issues are common to any space-based communications system. Russia and China have a backup for their GPS systems; we don’t.”
Bad Things Do Happen
Matheny noted that GPS disruptions aren’t just speculative—they can and do occur.
“On March 19, 2026, 12 airplanes reported false positions at Dallas-Fort Worth airport as a result of GPS interference,” Matheny said. “In mid-May 2024, solar storms impacted GPS such that farmers across the Midwest were advised to postpone use of their GPS-assisted tractors during planting season.”
Matheny also flagged a January 2022 incident in which GPS service was disrupted for more than 33 hours in the Denver area, affecting both aircraft and ground-based users over eight square miles. The cause of the outage was later determined to be accidental, traced to a transmitter inadvertently operating in GPS spectrum.
GPS jamming or spoofing (the replacement of valid GPS information with spurious signals) occurs frequently in military combat zones and also along the U.S. southern border, Matheny noted.
“While illegal, there are numerous low-power jammers that can be found for sale online,” he said. “These are known to be used by people who would like to conceal their movements, but in doing so also create interference issues in their vicinity.”
A commercial-grade GPS jammer is currently available for military applications, Matheny added, and Russia has demonstrated its ability to use satellite-transmitted signals to interfere with GPS operations.
BPS to the Rescue
Given these vulnerabilities, BPS technology seems to have arrived just in time to bolster the existing GPS navigational and time-transfer applications.
“The beauty of BPS is that it can easily become part of a broadcast system,” Arnold said. “Transmitters and towers are already in place. Once stations have converted to ATSC 3.0, the cost to add BPS is nominal.
Added Matheny: “The amount of equipment is relatively small in that you need a BPS synchronizer and a source of reference time. However, I’ll note that BPS has to function as a single, synchronized, managed network and is not something that a station would just go out and do on their own as each station has to be part of a coordinated system. That is why we launched Merkhet Solutions to deploy BPS nationwide service.”
Where Are We Now?
The concept of using broadcaster-originated signals as a GPS-adjunct dates back about five years, in a paper delivered at the 2021 NAB Broadcast Engineering and IT (BEIT) conference by its inventors: NAB’s Tariq Mondal, Bob Weller and Sam Matheny. Demonstrations and field testing began shortly afterwards and continue to the present.
Matheny said Merkhet Solutions currently has a cooperative R&D agreement in place with NIST covering several aspects of the technology, as well as a contract
with the U.S. Department of Transportation for BPS field studies. He also described testing of BPS technology in a power grid application.
The beauty of BPS is that it can easily become part of a broadcast system. Transmitters and towers are already in place.”
Harvey Arnold, Sinclair
“We partnered with Dominion Energy [a Richmond, Va.-based energy producer and distributor] for this effort, and have BPS installed at one of the largest power substations on the East Coast,” he said. “BPS is being evaluated for use with phasor measurement units and fault detection systems. The results thus far are positive and meet the needs of energy grid operations.”
Dominion Energy testing involves over-the-air signals from WHUT-TV Washington, D.C., and WNUV Baltimore, Arnold said.
“WNUV receives WHUT-TV, which is about 40 miles away,” he explained. “It’s configured as the ‘leader’ station which is referenced to the coordinated universal [CUT or UTC]time reference sent from the NIST facility in Boulder, Colo.”
The Baltimore station (WNUV) receives the time information signal from the Washington station (WHUT-TV), resynchronizes to it, and then retransmits this precision time information in a “leader-follower” manner, Arnold continued.
“As the BPS network develops, such ‘leader-followers’ can serve as important tools in helping to economically extend the coverage of the BPS network,” he added.
Sinclair is getting ready to turn on another BPS station (WIAV-CD, a Class-A station in Washington, D.C.) to determine how many hops are possible before the timing signal is degraded.
“This will also provide a third location for testing and analysis of BPS positioning information,” Arnold said.
Time to Retire ATSC 1.0
BPS is a unique application of ATSC 3.0 and cannot be added to ATSC 1.0, according to Metheny.
“It has to do with the signal and framing structure where BPS is leveraging the bootstrap emission time, which doesn’t exist in 1.0,” he said. “Additionally, the use of a highly robust physical layer pipe [PLP] in ATSC 3.0 enables a BPS signal that operates below the noise floor, which also isn’t possible with 1.0.”
Arnold and Matheny agreed that a nationwide BPS deployment won’t be possible until a hard date for ATSC 1.0 shutoff is established.
“We need more transmitters and geographic separation for good positional information in implementing BPS,” Arnold said. “This requires the sunsetting of ATSC 1.0. That’s one of our pushes right now.”
Matheny added: “A firm time frame for transition would certainly be helpful. That is true for BPS as well as for consumers and NextGen TV generally. Having a timeline certainty enables everyone to plan and invest accordingly. My hope is that BPS can help accelerate the transition, as it solves a well-defined and big problem.”
