Merkhet Solutions

About Merhket Solutions

Leading with Innovation

In 2020, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) leadership challenged their Technology team to think beyond traditional television and develop ideas for meaningful broadcast services that could be uniquely delivered via ATSC 3.0 transmissions. The team responded with the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS) and published a scientific paper outlining the concept at the 2021 Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference.

BPS was designed to address the overreliance on GPS as a time source for critical infrastructure and mitigate the resulting economic risk, estimated at more than $1 billion per day. NAB developed BPS in concert with government and industry stakeholders in a heavily collaborative effort designed to ensure that BPS meets the needs of critical infrastructure and can help safeguard our national and economic security. This includes a cooperative research and development agreement with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a field trial with Dominion Energy supported by a contract award from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT).

BPS has gone through numerous stages of research and development, including concept, prototypes, low-power demonstrations, full-power test deployments and real-world field trials with successes and improvements recognized at each stage.

Merkhet Solutions was created by NAB and its members to take the next step and deploy BPS as the primary complementary position, navigation and timing solution to enhance national and economic security.

Three Energy Grid Workers Seeing How Broadcast Positioning System Gets Installed at Power Station

OUR HISTORY

Five Years of Development

From a 2021 research paper to real-world deployments in 2026 — the work that built the Broadcast Positioning System.

2021

Initial Scientific Paper

BPS Research Paper Published at Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference

2022

First Prototype

First prototype demonstrated to U.S. DOT staff in the NAB lab.

2023

First Live Broadcast and Demonstration

Live Broadcast of BPS as part of the Protecting GPS With Resilient PNT Solutions Seminar at Humber College in Toronto.

2024

CRADA with NIST Signed

Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) initiated with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and NAB member Nexstar Media Group.

Jan 2025

BPS Research Published at ION ITM

NIST research paper concludes BPS to be “comparable to or better than GNSS” for time transfer stability and a “viable complementary PNT solution” in a peer-reviewed paper presented at the Institute of Navigation (ION) International Technical Meeting.

Aug 2025

DOT Field Trial Contract Awarded

U.S. Department of Transportation awarded NAB a contract to deploy a field trial of BPS with Dominion Energy, a lifeline critical infrastructure partner.

2026

Merkhet Solutions Launches

Merkhet Solutions is incorporated as an independent commercial company to further develop and deploy BPS as the primary complementary positioning, navigation and timing solution to enhance national and economic security.

About The Name

What’s a Merkhet?

MER-ket /ˈmɜːr.kɛt/: an instrument of knowing

A merkhet was an ancient Egyptian astronomical instrument that was invented to measure time at night. It was a ground-based reference tool for establishing time via celestial alignment and solved a significant problem people had over 2,600 years ago.