Mobile MLAT for PBN and ADS-B performance assessments
Maurizio Scaramuzza, Martin Loeser, Daniel Früh · Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften digital collection (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) · 2015
When utilizing Performance Based Navigation (PBN) and Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) it is of particular interest to assess the quality of these new applications. One possible means to analyze the performance is a comparison to position data obtained from a multilateration (MLAT) approach, where various receivers operating at 1090MHz are employed. This method has the advantage that all airplanes operating under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) can be tracked through both their Secondary Surveillance Radar (SSR) transponder replies and their transmitted ADS-B messages. For this purpose, a mobile, inexpensive and easy-to-use MLAT system was developed and used for reference tracking. Various field tests revealed that it features a horizontal accuracy of a few meters, outperforming the performance parameter estimation from PBN and ADS-B by an order of magnitude in most cases.