Dr. G. Linn Roth has been re-elected to the presidency of the International Loran Association. He previously served as ILA President during 1999 and 2000, and again in 2003.  As President, he heads a Board of Directors which includes four newly-elected Directors and eight Directors continuing in their three-year terms.  The President appoints three members to one-year terms on the Board. Terms begin after the Association’s convention and technical symposium in November, 2003.

Biographies for Board members elected this year are given below:

G. Linn Roth, Ph.D., FRIN  (roth@locusinc.com) Linn Roth is the current President of the International Loran Association (ILA) and was previously President from 1998-2000.  He has been a member of the ILA since 1990, has served on the ILA’s Board of Directors since 1995, was ILA Vice President in 1996, and is currently Vice-Chairman of the ILA’s global augmentation for satellite systems (GAUSS) initiative, which facilitates development of international Loran standards.  He has lead ILA efforts to obtain Congressional support and a positive Loran policy in the USA, and been Chairman of the ILA’s Congressional Liaison Committee since 2000.   He has also been active in supporting international cooperation on Loran and multinational participation in the ILA.  He received the ILA’s Medal of Merit in 1998, President’s Award in 1994, and Outstanding Service Award in 2001.  Linn is also a member of the Institute of Navigation (ION) and the Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN), and was recently elected a Fellow of the RIN.  He has published and presented numerous papers in professional journals, meetings, and commercial publications, all in support of Loran as a high performance, multimodal, cost-effective complement to GNSS. Linn has nearly twenty-five years of experience in the electronics industry, and has been President of Locus, Inc. (www.locusinc.com) of Madison, Wisconsin since 1990.  Locus specializes in spread spectrum industrial radios for secure wireless data communications in industrial, utility, water treatment, GPS and other applications, and in high performance, all-in-view Loran receivers for navigation, timing and monitoring applications.

Tom Celano (tpcelano@timing.com) is the General Manager, and Director of Systems Engineering, for Timing Solutions Corporation (TSC) in Boulder, CO.  Mr. Celano is responsible for the program management and technical direction for all U.S. Dept. of Defense and U.S. Coast Guard projects at TSC.  Mr. Celano is electrical engineer with extensive experience in precision time recovery, time/frequency distribution, and satellite communications.  Mr. Celano managed the development and installation of the first multi-cesium time recovery system at US DoD sites and is the program manager for the new time and frequency equipment (TFE) suites for the transmitting LORAN-C stations of the US Coast Guard.  Mr. Celano has designed and managed the development, test and installation of two-way time transfer systems (both over satellite links and fiber optic links) and time based transmitter systems.  He has also led R&D projects that advanced the state-of-the art in fiber optic time synchronization below the nanosecond (in 1996), then the picosecond (2001), and conducted the first demonstration of nanosecond level timing to an airborne platform (2002).  Mr. Celano is director of TSC.  Mr. Celano has an MSEE and a BSEE from Virginia Tech. 

Robert W. Lilley, Ph. D. (robertlilley@cox.net) is Vice President of Illgen Simulation Technologies, Santa Barbara, CA. He is responsible for the company's navigation and Loran-C related projects, currently emphasizing all-in-view receiver designs, antennas and software as a part of the FAA Loran-C program. He is the company point of contact for the Washington DC - based Illgen staff supporting FAA Systems Engineering. Bob has been a member of the ILA Board of Directors since 1989 and served as President in 1992-93, during the time the Association was beginning to emphasize the value of a multiple-system world including Loran-C.  He has been Newsletter Editor, Constitution and Bylaws Committee Chair, Convention Chair (1996) and Technical Co-Chair (1998). In 1995, he was awarded the Association's Medal of Merit.  He assists with the activities of the ILA Operations Center on a continuing basis. Dr. Lilley is Director Emeritus of the Avionics Engineering Center, Ohio University, earned his Ph.D. at Ohio University and is an instrument-rated commercial pilot. As part of the Joint University Program team, he was awarded the FAA's first Excellence in Aviation Award in 1997.

William F. (Bill) Roland (broland@knology.net) is a Consulting Engineer with PVT Associates, Panama City Beach, Florida, USA.   He has retired as President of Megapulse, Inc.  Prior to joining Megapulse, Bill served as a commissioned officer in the United States Coast Guard for 30 years.  He is a graduate of the USCG Academy and an electronics engineer with a MSEE from the US Naval Postgraduate School.  During his Coast Guard service he specialized in development engineering, including program manager assignments for the development of the first low-cost Loran-C receivers, and for the development of the solid state Loran-C transmitter.  His has written many papers on Loran-C signal coding and timing.  Currently he is participating in the evaluation of the use of Loran-C in US air space.  Bill is a charter member of the ILA, served on the board of directors for the first ten years, and is currently a board member.

Professor Durk van Willigen (d.vanwilligen@reelektronika.nl) founded Reelektronika bv in 1975, a consulting company specialized in radio positioning systems, navigation, radar, and signal processing for land, marine and aeronautical applications. In 2000 he retired as appointed professor in Electronic Navigation Systems at the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. At Delft University he headed a group of researchers and students for 11 years. His group was very active in the field of GPS receiver signal processing algorithms to reject multipath (MEDLL) and interference, and together with Rockwell Collins still is heavily involved in NASA’s Aviation Safety Program Synthetic Vision. Dr. Van Willigen initialized Eurofix in 1989 and has been the principal investigator since. He has published many papers on navigation systems in general, and on Loran-C and Eurofix in particular.
In 1996, the International Loran Association awarded Dr. van Willigen the Medal of Merit. In 1999 he became Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation in the United Kingdom. He is the recipient of the Thurlow 1999 Award of the United States’ Institute of Navigation, and recently, also of the Gold Medal 2002 of the Royal Institute of Navigation in the UK. Dr. Van Willigen is a member of the Advisory Board of the Netherlands Institute of Navigation and is a director of the International Loran Association. Finally, he is Chairman of the Board of the GAUSS Research Foundation.