ITT Corp. Network Operations Center, based at the company’s offices in Herndon, Va., was built to monitor, troubleshoot the
nationwide infrastructure of ADS-B radio sites. Technicians analyze event messages and resolve automated trouble tickets.
Half of the planned radio sites for
Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) “essential” services
have been built under Segment 1 of the
FAA contract, which calls for construction of 330 sites by September.
There were 165 radio sites built at
this writing, 90 of them operational,
according to ADS-B prime contractor
ITT Corp. A typical radio site features
one omnidirectional Universal Access
Transceiver (UAT) antenna and four
sectorized 1090ES antennas, supporting
a dual-frequency approach to communicating with aircraft.
Twelve ADS-B stations — nine of
which were installed and operational —
will be located on offshore oil platforms
in the Gulf of Mexico. Nine terrestrial
sites are located around the Gulf.
Some of the platform-based ADS-B
stations will be collocated with Automated Weather Observing System
(AWOS) installations by All Weather
Inc. (AWI), of Sacramento, Calif. AWI
is a subcontractor to ITT in providing
35 AWOS systems for surface weather
measurements on Gulf oil platforms
and for AWOS systems in Alaska. VHF
radio terminals to transmit AWOS data
are being installed by FAA.
ADS-B essential services consist of
Traffic Information Service-Broadcast
(TIS-B) and Flight Information Ser-
vice-Broadcast (FIS-B) transmissions
to properly equipped aircraft.
As of September, ITT plans to complete deployment of ADS-B services
for 19 enroute service volumes: Jacksonville, Boston, Juneau, South Alaska,
Anchorage-Fairbanks, McGrath,
Yukon, Nome, Kotzebue-Northern
Alaska, Albuquerque, Seattle, Cleveland, New York, Atlanta, Washington,
Los Angeles, Chicago, Oakland and
Minneapolis. Remaining enroute and
terminal service volumes will be provisioned in Segment 2 of the contract.
ITT in January was conducting flight
tests for ADS-B service acceptance testing of the Boston ARTCC, which was
being provisioned with essential services
under Segment 1. An Ohio University-operated Beechcraft King Air based in
Portland, Me., was used to fly prearranged flight paths to test the boundaries of the service volume.
The company had established two
of three control stations planned for
the continental U.S., at Ashburn, Va.,
and Dallas, and a scaled-down regional
station at Anchorage. The control
stations receive and process ADS-B
targets from the radio sites and data
supporting TIS-B and FIS-B broadcasts. The third CONUS station will
be located on the West Coast; other
regional stations were eyed for Guam,
Hawaii and Puerto Rico. — Bill Carey
