Overview
- Civil ATC: En-route, Approach, Tower, Ground movement and Engineering radar displays.
- Military Air Defence: Homeland Defence radar displays.
- Military ATC: Area, terminal, tower and engineering radar displays.
Description & Application
All display positions are fully autonomous. Scan conversion, graphical processing and target tracking are performed locally at each display position, to give the system multiple redundancy. There are four active modules in the RDS 1600 radar display::
- Processor
- Trackerball (or mouse) and hot key array
- Control panel
- Display Screen
The hot keys and control panel use conventional short travel switches and sealed potentiometers. The control array has five distinct areas:
- Trackerball (or mouse)
- Hot keys
- Primary radar select, background video, gain and clutter controls
- Qwerty keys
- Numeric keys
The hot keys are frequently customised for a specific ATC unit, and in general provide the individual, high priority functions which are most frequently used by controllers. For example, when the cursor is placed over a target and the hot key "Label rotate" is selected, then the label will rotate clockwise by 45 degrees for each time the hot key is pressed.
The Trackerball is used to position the cursor on the screen and an array of three buttons is used to give commands to the display system. In general, these commands are limited to the selection of aids to the controller and some examples are listed below:
- Map scene and map overlay selection.
- Temporary map generation (or editing) and selection.
- Map zoom and pan.
- Primary target persistence.
- Filter selection (code, flight level and volume filters).
- Global label format selection.
- ADS and CPDL functions.
- Primary radar trails, SSR trail dots and predictive vectors.
- ERBM and cursor lines configuration.
- Selection of the data page window.
The Trackerball and menu interaction duplicate some of the facilities provided by the hot key array.
Display Screen
The PPI field is entirely conventional, with the use of colour primarily as an aid to airside zones, controlled airspace or danger area recognition. The system colour set can be configured on site to match the operating environment. The target and map symbology is also entirely configurable.
Mapping
The map data is divided into three types
| Type | Description |
| Map Scenes (16) |
The default map scene, and 3 other user selected map scenes are available as single key selections from the hot key array. Each map scene has independent range and offset, and may be constructed from any number of the of map overlays.
|
| Map Overlays (16) |
Map overlays comprise basic geographic, aeronautical or tactical information that can be called up in the map scenes as necessary. These static map overlays may generated or edited at any PC and loaded into the working positions as required.
|
| Dynamic Map Overlays (16) |
Dynamic map overlays may be generated or edited by the operator without interruption to the normal working of his position. The overlays can be called up into any map scene as required.
|
Some typical examples of map overlays are:
| Coastlines | MATZ | Air Lanes |
| Reporting Points | Extended centre line | Control Zones |
| Beacons | Danger areas | Airside map |
| Holding points (active) | Holding points | Temporary Airside Works |
The overlays are used to assemble specific map scenes, each with a defined range and offset from the centre. Any or all of the overlays may be used in each scene and there may be 16 independent scenes at each position. Examples of typical map scenes are:
| Area Control | 200 Nm range |
| LARS Service | 80 Nm range |
| Approach West | 40 Nm range offset 25 Nm |
| Approach East | 40 Nm range offset 25 Nm |
| Aerodrome Traffic | 20 Nm range offset 5 Nm |
| Runway (in use) | 1 Nm range |
| Runway (alternate 1) | 1.5 Nm range |
The map data may be easily amended or updated on site using any text editor or Word Processing package. All the data is held on 3.5 inch floppy disks, and is presented in a series of lists containing the feature name, colour, style, latitude and longitude as shown below:
| Title | *** Teesside CTA *** |
| Feature type c | * Polyline* |
| Line colour and style | 6, 6 |
| Number of vertices | 4 |
| Latitude and | N54 33.9883, W001 31.3390
N54 42.1986, W001 16.7652 |
| Longitude | N54 42.2777, W001 10.8470
N54 37.5743, W001 01.8470 |
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