WASHINGTON—The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has announced the launch of Merkhet Solutions, Inc., an independent company focused on the commercial deployment of the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS).
BPS is a terrestrial timing and positioning technology that uses the NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0) broadcast standard to deliver precise time and location signals over the existing network of U.S. broadcast towers.
First conceived by the technology team at NAB in 2021, the patented terrestrial, GPS-independent timing and positioning technology is designed to leverage the high-power, geographically diverse broadcast infrastructure already covering the United States.
"BPS represents a powerful intersection of innovation, public safety and opportunity for broadcasters,” said NAB president and CEO Curtis LeGeyt. “Launching Merkhet Solutions is the next step in commercializing this technology and ensuring it reaches the critical infrastructure operators who need it most, while continuing to create meaningful long-term opportunities for local stations."
BPS has been designed to address the more than $1 billion-per-day economic and national security risk posed by overreliance on GPS. To push forward the commercial deployment of BPS, Merkhet Solutions is engaging across critical infrastructure sectors, including energy, data centers, telecommunications and financial services where a loss of precision time can trigger grid instability, outages and lost trades.
“BPS solves a problem we can no longer afford to ignore: an entire economy and national security posture resting on a single, contested signal from space,” said Merkhet Solutions CEO Sam Matheny. “We built BPS at NAB because broadcast infrastructure is uniquely suited to deliver assured terrestrial timing at scale. We're launching Merkhet Solutions because the time to operationalize this technology is now."
Under Matheny’s leadership at NAB, BPS advanced rapidly from research concept to real-world deployment.
NAB demonstrated the first BPS prototype to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) in 2022, followed by the first live broadcast demonstration in 2023. In 2024, NAB entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Nexstar Media Group.
In 2025, NIST concluded in a peer-reviewed paper presented at the Institute of Navigation International Technical Meeting that BPS was “comparable to or better than GNSS” for time transfer stability and a “viable complementary PNT solution.” Later that year, the U.S. DOT awarded NAB a contract to deploy a BPS field trial with critical infrastructure partner Dominion Energy.
BPS is designed as a terrestrial complement to GPS, providing operators with an additional resilient source of timing and positioning that can be used alongside GPS or relied upon when satellite-based services are disrupted by jamming, spoofing, cyberattacks or natural events. The need for terrestrial complements to GPS has been recognized by the U.S. government through the National Timing Resilience and Security Act and Executive Order 13905.
The NAB said that Merkhet Solutions will operate as an independent company focused on the commercial deployment of BPS, which was first conceived by the technology team at NAB in 2021. The company intends to serve customers across all critical infrastructure sectors, with an emphasis on the life-line sectors of energy, telecommunications, data centers and financial services where timing precision is mission-critical and GPS vulnerability is unacceptable risk.
Learn more at merkhetsolutions.com.
