Eurocontrol has integrated Rohde & Schwarz’s air traffic control (ATC) direction finding technology into its deployment of an advanced safety technology system to improve the performance of ATC stations.
To this end, the new and advanced radio direction finding (RDF) system, which employs Rohde & Schwarz products, has been deployed in a crowded segment of European airspace.
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The Eurocontrol system uses the Rohde & Schwarz’s R&S DDF04E direction finder, which enables parallel direction finding on multiple channels with the same high level of accuracy on all channels.
A wide-aperture DF antenna with nine antenna elements is used to collect the aircraft’s radio transmission data, which is assessed according to the correlative interferometer direction finding method.
This combination helps provide enhanced accuracy, sensitivity and outstanding immunity to reflections.
Eurocontrol project manager Patrick Bardet said: “RDF makes working with heavy traffic easier for air traffic controllers because it gives them an idea of which aircraft is calling, saving them precious seconds, especially when aircraft have similar call signs.”
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By GlobalDataThe system has been installed to offer additional safety to commercial aircraft flying in the airspace controlled by Eurocontrol’s air navigation service provider (ANSP), Maastricht Upper Area Control Center (MUAC).
In the first phase of deployment, which enables air traffic controllers to locate and track aircraft voice communications, four radio direction finder units have been in operational use since October 2016.
By the end of June 2017, the company plans to complete the rollout of seven units in Belgium, the Netherlands and north-west Germany.
In the densely populated MUAC airspace, 25 aircraft are usually controlled at any one time in a single sector.
At the system level, all information collected from the various RDF stations is collected and processed centrally at MUAC.
In addition, measurement results are collected from each RDF and at several frequencies of interest in parallel, allowing the MUAC controllers to monitor the desired frequencies in their allocated flight sector
