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Britain Could Switch Off Airport Radar and Release 5G Spectrum
judgecorp writes "Britain is considering switching off air traffic control radar systems and using "passive radar" instead. A two year feasibility study will consider using a network of ground stations which monitor broadcast TV signals and measure echoes from aircraft to determine their location and velocity. The system is not a new idea — early radar experiments used BBC shortwave transmitters as a signal source before antenna technology produced a transceiver suitable for radar — but could now be better than conventional radar thanks to new antenna designs and signal processing techniques. It will also save money and energy by eliminating transmitters — and release spectrum for 5G services."
It works for detecting stealth fighters over Iran, it should certainly work for non-stealth commercial aircraft.
No sig today...
Seriously... You've not heard of 5G? It's a whole G better than that dowdy old 4G. Better start saving up for it today!
Radar provider Thales has been given government funding by the Technology Strategy Board to investigate how existing TV signals could be used to locate and track aircraft
Thales are just starting out on this. An industrialised solution is therefore a decade away from availability and another ten years from being accepted as a primary source of data on aircraft movements.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
To everyone thinking that safety will depend on the TV transmitters being always on, this is likely to replace only *one* of the types of radar, primary radar (where you send out a signal and look for reflections). SSR (secondary surveillance radar) won't be going away. This type of radar sends out a signal and the aircraft actively replies.
Primary radar is used to paint targets that don't have transponders. What the CAA has been angling to do for a while now is make Mode-S transponders mandatory in controlled airspace (they did want everything, including hang gliders(!) to carry a Mode-S transponder at one point). Therefore the cost will just be transferred to the hand-to-mouth sector of aviation if they want to still have access to controlled airspace.
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What do you see if you take a closer look into the VHF signals arround there?
That's a 50Mhz TV transmiter carrier.
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8383/8473254438_2a2f9819d2_o.jpg
A lot of aircraft reflections everywhere. ;)
Sould be "easy" to implement a multistatic radar with gnuradio.
73 de EA1FAQ
Yeah given the fact the UK has had only 4 TV channels for decades, took another decade to add a 5th channel, and reception is piss poor unless you live under an antenna.
And UK is one of the bussiest airspaces in the world.
I do not like this one bit.
um.. we have about 50 channels or so on broadcast TV now and countless bullshit channels factoring in satellite and cable
i get a better reception on the digital channels than i did on the analogue set up... not that i watch it much tbh... it's 99% shit which is generally what happens with hundreds of channels... that and fucking repeats
BA 5390 didn't need radar to guide it down. No maps got sucked out.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/place-london/A20460782
"but due to the congested airspace around both Gatwick and Heathrow, he was directed to land at Southampton Airport. Southampton was closer, but all the maps and charts had been lost in the blow-out, and having never landed there before, the co-pilot was obviously anxious about the prospect of making a good landing."
http://www.fss.aero/accident-reports/dvdfiles/GB/1990-06-10-UK.pdf
"The co-pilot had requested radar vectors to the nearest airport and had been turned towards Southampton Airportand eventually transferred to their approach frequency."
"I have a VOR but it will be radar vectors onto the visual final"
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
All of the BBC's transmitters were sold off to a private company years ago as part of the Broadcasting Act 1990.
um.. we have about 50 channels or so on broadcast TV now and countless bullshit channels
And program quality has dropped down to Anerican levels, yes. The relationbetween program quality and number of channels has again been proven to be inversely proportional.
Worse, the BBC is now in a deep financial crisis from having to fill up multiple channels instead of just two, quality ones.
No sig today...
Airport radar systems can fail, too.
Maybe you'd better call them and express your concerns...
No sig today...
Not quite sure what your point is. Mine is that airport radar is critical safety equipment that I don't want compromised so some teen can stream One Direction in HD.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Umm. Radar vectors are basically directions for the aircraft, I don't see why you couldn't give vectors for the aircraft if you get the same information from a passive radar. (Also, the planes will most likely keep their radars, won't they?)
It is what it is.
Well, yocto is an official SI prefix, meaning 10^(-24). So you need 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 yoctobytes to store just one byte.
Now to store the complete internet in several yoctobytes, you must have an extremely good compression algorithm. :-)
What I was implying rather hastily was that these transmitters might not exist when they're ready to make the switch.
It's too laggy if you use geostationary satellites. 36000km each way is too far.
I have read articles that claim you could run a swarm of LEO satellites at 500 - 800 km high that talk to each other with lasers, and the ground with microwaves.
Basically a mesh network in space. In remote areas you would beat wired speeds.
Of course you need a lot of satellites for coverage, and a microwave transceiver for each connection to the swarm-net.
Everything needs to know where everything else is (to point the lasers and antennas), so I think the ground stations would have to be stationary, at least in the beginning.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
Civillian aircraft have all sorts of radar: airliners can detect other aircraft. I believe there was an incident where an airliner's collision detection radar atually detected an F117 and had to temporarily abort a climb, due to a near miss.
But yes, most civillian aircraft are small don't have any radar whatsoever.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
They shouldn't need wireless spectrum for that job.
Cat5 cable is purpose built for the task.
If that's not enough the natural solution is to log onto the net with cat5e for 2.7 times more bandwidth.
Airliners can detect other aircraft. I believe there was an incident where an airliner's collision detection radar atually detected an F117 and had to temporarily abort a climb, due to a near miss.
The Traffic Collision Avoidance System uses transponders of a particular type: they communicate with one another to determine mutual range (from round-trip signal times), azimuth (by using directional antennas) and altitude (as reported by the transponders). TCAS is mandatory for all but small airliners in most of the world, and the military use it when they are not in combat.
http://www.ll.mit.edu/publications/journal/pdf/vol02_no3/2.3.7.TCAS.pdf
I don't upgrade every year. I'm just waiting for 8G so the speeds will actually be as claimed for 4G
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Not even remotely accurate. 1G to 2G was a transition from analogue to digital cellular. You still only had a basic WAP modem function at best, and were charged per minute. At this point I had 56kbps dial up at home.
It wasn't until GPRS was added to that we even had a dedicated data channel and that was limited to sub-dial-up speeds, on a good day, but at least you were charged for the data you used and not how long your phone was online, so you could have an always-active data connection. At this point I had 512kbps broadband.
3G took that up to about 300kbps at launch - at least a tenfold improvement - and went as high as 2Mbps, before the arrival of HSDPA and related technologies that can get you up to about 50Mbps on the same spectrum. My phone was now as fast as - and often faster than - my home broadband.
1G - 0
2G - 0.05 - 0.1
3G - 0.5 - 50
4G - 50 - ?
Doesn't look like decreasing returns to me.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
It's easy, each G is faster than the prior G. The only question is, are H's even faster than G's? Do you work for the phone company? Can I have a job there?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.