Aerocivil Awards Air Traffic Control Modernization Contract To Rohde & Schwarz

Aerocivil, the Colombian Civil Aeronautics Special Administrative Unit (UAEAC) has awarded Rohde & Schwarz a contract to modernize the country’s civilian air traffic control (ATC) system over the coming months with a target completion date of February 2016. The nationwide modernization project will put Colombia in the top tier of civil aviation safety and operational efficiency in Latin America. Rohde & Schwarz will handle the system integration of its own equipment as well as subsystems supplied by third-party companies. The contract calls for the modernization of a total of 106 radio sites, including ATC towers, remote sites and ACCs.

Key to the modernization is the acquisition, installation and configuration of 984 units of R&S Series4200 radios along with the antennas, filters and other passive elements that together create the complete ATC system. A potential follow-on project is the inclusion of the increased flight safety feature DSiT for the “detection of simultaneous transmissions”, which can be made easily possible as an R&S Series4200 software option.

Rohde & Schwarz also has assumed responsibility for providing the UAEAC with a turnkey project at hand-over. This includes training Colombian personnel in the use and servicing of the equipment, providing advanced servicing of the equipment when needed, and generally ensuring that the new ATC system will be fully operational. “We chose Rohde & Schwarz as our partner in this critical project because of the company’s international reputation for providing superior products, system integration and ongoing support,” says Gustavo Grisales, Telecommunications Director at UAEAC. “The combination of the company’s radio communications knowledge and its experience in solving system-level air traffic control problems is widely acknowledged in the industry.”

R&S Series4200 radios offer highest operational safety and an extremely wide range of configurations, which permits optimal adaptation to any ATC application. This degree in flexibility has become possible because the radios are based on a software architecture and implementation rather than being hardwired. New functions are implemented through software upgrades that Rohde & Schwarz will make available. This DSiT software option, for example, is the industry’s first solution for the safety critical problem of undetected simultaneous transmissions (USiT). The new DSiT feature uses an innovative algorithm to detect the presence of simultaneous radio calls in the transmission channel. The air traffic controller is then notified that two calls have been received and can take action accordingly.