Civil Aviation Navigation Technology Application Policy
As air travel has become cheaper and more widespread, modern airports handle a lot of air traffic. With hundreds of takeoffs and landings, topological hazards, weather changes, mechanical failures, and security threats to manage every day, nothing is more important to air traffic control than communications.
That's why in busy airports, when communications are compromised, there is little choice but to drastically reduce operations until the problem is resolved, which can cost millions of dollars.
There are many civilian and military uses of RF, which means there are many potential sources of disruption (unintentional or premeditated) and the ensuing chaos.
Since in most cases the problem is reporting rather than measuring, there is a lack of data to classify disturbances. While this requires the purchase of expensive equipment, the potential savings from reduced downtime can be significant.
The process of identifying and isolating sources can be laborious; not all disturbances are persistent, so by the time monitoring equipment arrives on site, the source of the disturbance may have stopped working or changed location or frequency.
Various activities can cause radio frequency interference, some may be harmful, some may be caused by legitimate electronic equipment operating at conflicting frequencies, and some may occur due to malfunction. A malfunctioning transceiver on the back-and-forth aircraft could create interference that could interfere with the normal operation of the control tower for months and go undetected.
To find and fix problems, RF monitoring equipment operated by qualified engineers should be deployed to determine the precise frequency and direction of outages. Several companies have developed continuous RF monitoring equipment designed to provide broad coverage and provide a constant flow of information about impending and ongoing interference.
Whether increasing the speed of deployment of RF surveillance vehicles or investing in fixed RF surveillance solutions, airports must invest in maintaining the integrity of their communications.
By simply detecting civilian radio frequency jammers, cellular jammers or jammer gps, such a system can greatly limit the financial impact of such interference by quickly directing operators to the root cause of the interference and saving valuable time.
As radio waves and traffic lanes become more congested, radio frequency interference goes from a nuisance to a formidable threat. The vulnerability of RF communications means that finding and eliminating any sources of interference is critical to the safe operation of airports.