The National Association of Broadcasters has launched Merkhet Solutions an independent company focused on 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.
Developed 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.
Merkhet Solutions will engage across infrastructure sectors, including energy, data centers, telecommunications and financial services, to push forward the technology’s commercial deployment, NAB said in a release.
“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,” NAB President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt said.
NAB named Sam Matheny the CEO of Merkhet Solutions. Under Matheny’s leadership, BPS advanced rapidly from research concept to real-world deployment, NAB said.
It demonstrated the first BPS prototype to the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2022, followed by the first live broadcast demonstration in 2023.
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. Department of Transportation 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.
NAB said Merkhet Solutions intends to serve customers across all critical infrastructure sectors, with an emphasis on the lifeline sectors of energy, telecommunications, data centers and financial services, where timing precision is mission-critical and GPS vulnerability is an unacceptable risk.
[Related: “Matheny Discusses ATSC 3.0-based BPS Developments”]
