Technical and Operational Aspects of Migration Concepts of a Broadband VHF Communication System (B-VHF)

Kurzfassung

This paper describes several deployment concepts including the transition strategies starting from the existing VHF systems to a fully deployed B-VHF system. It presents the main constrains, which affect different migration strategies. The B-VHF project deals with the investigation, design, and evaluation of a broadband overlay communications system for aeronautical communications in the VHF band. This overlay concept facilitates in-band transition from the current to a future ATC communications system and, thus, allows this future system to remain in the advantageous and protected VHF band. Beside this straight transition in the VHF band this paper presents alternative B-VHF system deployment scenarios, which have no or only partly overlay character. For a few selected deployment scenarios a first estimation about the available bandwidth and the possible cell sizes was performed. This first approximation for the B-VHF system capacity was performed for the whole airspace over Europe using the NAVSIM tool.