Mode S on the map

[alexc]

Hi,

I bought my RadarBox last week, and as expected, I'm impressed. Not quite so impressed with the location of my house (in a valley, surrounded by trees, where the nearest airport is used almost exclusively by FlyBe). Still, have laptop, will travel.

It got me thinking though: Having used PCAS systems in the past, which are basically a passive Mode-A/C/S receiver that calculates the relative position of other aircraft, would it not be possible to do a similar thing with RadarBox? I haven't worked it out completely, but I'm thinking that given the position and altitude of the RB receiver, and a couple of ADS-B signals to triangulate from, it should be possible to determine a reasonably accurate position for Mode-S only aircraft. Yep, I was bored!

On another note, I do have a slightly more reasonable feature request: A multi-screen option, allowing the main window to be dedicated to the interface panel and the map to be un-docked and shown full-screen on a second monitor. Of course this is vaguely possible at the moment just by stretching the main window across both monitors and resizing the map to fit, but it's messy.

Anyway, thanks AirNav team for a great product!

Alex

[Deadcalm]

Ah, another window undocking proponent.  Airnav, please take note!

DC

[DaveReid]

Hi,

It got me thinking though: Having used PCAS systems in the past, which are basically a passive Mode-A/C/S receiver that calculates the relative position of other aircraft, would it not be possible to do a similar thing with RadarBox? I haven't worked it out completely, but I'm thinking that given the position and altitude of the RB receiver, and a couple of ADS-B signals to triangulate from, it should be possible to determine a reasonably accurate position for Mode-S only aircraft. Yep, I was bored!

Interesting idea.  There has been a bit of discussion on the "other" vendor's forum about using Mode S multilateration (rather than DF/triangulation) to get position fixes for non-ADS-B aircraft.  Had you thought about that approach ?

[Bethsalem]

Technically possible - but I wonder if this would make the UK and US Gov/Military a bit twitchy about being able to get a fairly accurate fix on their aircraft?  More heavy handed and ill thought out "anti-terrorist" legislation is all anyone needs.

[DaveReid]

Technically possible - but I wonder if this would make the UK and US Gov/Military a bit twitchy about being able to get a fairly accurate fix on their aircraft?  More heavy handed and ill thought out "anti-terrorist" legislation is all anyone needs.

I don't see why.  Anyone can buy a purpose-designed, off-the-shelf system that will do precisely that:

http://www.kinetic-avionics.co.uk/sbs-2MMainFeatures.php

[Bethsalem]

I stand corrected.  I was unaware that kinetic avionics had made such a system.  Just out of curiosity, does anyone own or have access to the sbs-2?

[AirNav Support]

Definitely not for the "Home" customer, costs for it are well over £10,000.

[Bethsalem]

There's no chance then that I can convince my nearest and dearest to get me one for Christmas ;o) !

[DaveReid]

Definitely not for the "Home" customer, costs for it are well over £10,000.

Definitely not for the "Home" customer, costs for it are well over £10,000.

AFAIK, £10K wouldn't buy even one SBS-2 - and you need at least 4 receivers for a multilateration system.

Maybe there's a market opportunity there for a cheap RadarBox (or SBS-1) based system ...

[alexc]

Interesting idea.  There has been a bit of discussion on the "other" vendor's forum about using Mode S multilateration (rather than DF/triangulation) to get position fixes for non-ADS-B aircraft.  Had you thought about that approach ?

Yeah, by 'triangulation' I did in fact mean multilateration. I suppose a phased array antenna and some clever processing would be another option for DF though.