I parsed and plotted the FAA's navigation aid file into KML for Google Earth. This includes VORs, VORTACs, and NDBs, among others. Even decommissioned VOTs are listed because they're still in the database. Other VOTs are still listed as operational. I thought they were obsolete. Seeing all the different navaids in Google Earth is pretty impressive. There are a lot of them. (File is in the KML folder if you can't be bothered to read the rest. It's called US_NAVAIDS, but it includes some foreign navaids, too.)
I tried to include as much data as possible about each navaid, but I left out the details on the Fan markers, because there are only eight of them unless there's a bug in my code someplace.
This file has not been checked, so take a look the VORs near your base and let me know if they're off.
Some of you may be thinking that radio navigation is becoming obsolete and that it's expensive to maintain 2,615 ground-based aids to navigation now that we have GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo. Certainly, many pilots rely on GPS exclusively, but I think that's a mistake. GPS signals are extraordinarily easy to jam. Jammers are cheap, but they're generally not strong enough to reach the altitude required.
Traditional radio-navigation has been working for years. It fails well. One NDB or VOR is not linked to any others, so if one fails, all the others still work. Given that there are thousands of them, it's hard to imagine not being able to tune in any VOR/VORTAC/NDB at all but the lowest altitudes.
With GPS, it's a little easier to imagine widespread failures now that incidents have been documented.
NOT FOR NAVIGATION.
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