Tellumat engineers needed to replace obsolete and hard-to-maintain plot extraction hardware at the airfield sites and to deliver enhanced capabilities. These included IFF radar decoding, simplified maintenance and the provision of a modern plan position indicator (PPI)-style radar display.
The two legacy plot extractors were replaced with dual independent systems containing Cambridge Pixel HPx radar interface cards as well as synchronous serial adapters to output the plot data to the remote sector control centres. A Windows-based user interface was built for each system using the display components from Cambridge Pixel’s SPx library to provide an integrated picture of maps, primary and IFF plots and scan-converted radar video.
Tellumat’s new custom solution – including Cambridge Pixel’s SPx Server plot extraction software – interfaces to the combined IFF video and mode pulses data stream for plot extraction. Plots are then passed to a remote display system for target tracking for ATC and mission control scenarios. A separate channel interfaces to the primary radar to extract primary plots.
Warren Whitfield, Software Development Manager, Air Traffic Management division, Tellumat, said: “Cambridge Pixel’s modular SPx software library made it easy for our engineers to design a custom solution that interfaced with existing equipment, where it was still fit for purpose, and add the new capabilities, such as IFF radar, that our client required.”
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