NAVIAIR heighten surveillance capabilities with WAM

Denmark choose COMSOFT’s innovative “Quadrant” solution for country-wide distribution of WAM

NAVIAIR will perform a cutting-edge upgrade to their surveillance network in order to provide enhanced and precise Air Traffic Control services throughout Denmark.

Following a rigorous evaluation process German surveillance expert COMSOFT were awarded the contract which will see the installations of 25 WAM stations across 23 sites country-wide, including Ålborg, Århus, Billund, Copenhagen and Roskilde airports, as well as two oil rigs in the North Sea.

Danish airspace extends over 61,000 square km, from the North Sea, across to Zealand and from the German border to Norway. Copenhagen Airport in Kastrup is home to NAVIAIR’s Control Centre where all Danish air traffic is organised, it is also Scandinavia’s International hub, serving over 21 million passengers per year with up to 850 take-offs and landings on busy days.

NAVIAIR Air Traffic Services include En-route, Approach and Tower Control, as well as flight information, briefing and alerting services and a Search and Rescue Service, which makes the difficult surveillance of helicopters essential.

Wide Area Multilateration (WAM) and ADS-B capabilities will be provided by COMSOFT’s ultra-compact remote sensors linked to a Quadrant Central Processor. This will provide high accuracy multilateration coverage for Denmark’s airspace and approaches, with an unrivalled ADS-B range extending beyond 300 NM. This provides a capability superior to secondary radar, with a higher accuracy, but at considerably lower costs.

The Quadrant Solution will allow for complex Air Traffic Management tasks to be performed, including in areas currently lacking comprehensive coverage, so with the placement of compact receiver stations on offshore oil platforms coastal surveillance gaps can be eliminated.

The superior product is built for extreme weather conditions so Denmark’s often icy temperatures present no challenge for a system that can cope at both ends of the temperature scale, having proven its abilities from Iceland to the Arabian dessert. Its exceptionally low power consumption also makes it an economical option that fits well with Copenhagen’s Ecofriendly image as European Green Capital 2014.

Quadrant is an expandable, integrated solution providing independent position measurement using multilateration techniques, by means of multiple remote ground stations reporting over conventional communication links. Advanced computer processing techniques allow aircraft position to be precisely calculated, and typically updated much more frequently than conventional radar, with update rates of one second being completely feasible.