Air traffic control is used to dealing with speed so ATDI has provided a blazing fast and easy way of planning and modelling their radio systems.

NATS (the UKs largest air navigation service provider) needs to predict, at given heights, the areas in which its ground stations can talk to aircraft. To calculate the coverage, the organisation uses ATDI’s flagship planning and modelling tool ICS telecom.

ATDI has now upgraded NATS’ systems so that coverage predictions are delivered in familiar forms such as JPEGs and using Excel spread sheets to control the calculations required.

“It’s a whole lot faster than it was before,” comments ATDI technical director Nick Kirkman, “and it’s easier for operators (as opposed to engineers) to use a standard programme based on Excel as the input interface. In addition, the output now comes in formats people have been dealing with for most of their working lives.

“We’ve always prided ourselves on meeting the customers’ requirements and in this case the customer wanted a simple and quick method which they could use to predict the coverage areas provided to aircraft at various heights without having to deal with the complexities of network engineering.”