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April 17, 4:38 EST
DALLAS and LOS ANGELES -- Officials at the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington recently selected the SuperView video processor from RGB Spectrum in Alameda, Calif., to help resolve safety issues in ground traffic at the Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) and Los Angeles International (LAX) airports.
The FAA needed a solution that would display multiple radar images of the entire airport ground traffic on a single monitor, so that air traffic controllers would have all vital information before them, RGB Spectrum officials say. Following research and evaluation, the FAA decided to upgrade each airport's air traffic control towers with advanced visual display systems using RGB Spectrum's SuperView 500 video processors, company officials say.
"The SuperView was the only solution that supported our proprietary video signal, says Devlin Maxwell, the FAA's electronics engineer for the Surveillance Systems Branch. "The windowing and display portion of this project was quite a challenge, given the fact that we have such an unusual video signal requirement. SuperView was the only video processor that would synchronize to our unique signal".
"In our mission critical environment, text and graphics has to be precise, sharp, and clean," Maxwell continues. "We are very pleased with SuperView's image quality. The ability of SuperView to provide clean, non-jitter images while maintaining excellent sharpness and clarity at such high input and output frequencies is a major benefit to us."
Prior to using SuperView DFW and LAX had unique dual-control air traffic tower configurations that posed a potentially perilous and clogged ground traffic situation, RGB Spectrum officials say. Each tower observed and controlled one half of airport ground traffic. Controllers had an unobstructed view and radar coverage only of the ground traffic in their respective section. Since aircraft and vehicles traverse through the entire airport runway and taxiway system, controllers were blind to incoming and outgoing ground traffic outside their sections. This situation raised the potential for accidents and limited the controllers' efficiency in managing ground traffic, company officials say.
The FAA faced a key technological challenge in the development of this new display system because air traffic control towers display systems used proprietary video signals with unique characteristics, RGB Spectrum officials say. Any video processor selected by the FAA had to support high scan rate EIA 434 composite video input signals, with a horizontal scan rate of 31KHz, twice the scan rate of standard NTSC video signals. The system's monitors also required that the video processor provide a high output of 1024x1024 resolution to provide adequate resolution for the multi image display, company officials say.
The FAA has installed five SuperView 500 systems at DFW airport control towers and two systems at LAX, RGB Spectrum officials say. Each SuperView receives two inputs from the airport's ASDE ground radar system depicting the ground traffic of both sides of the airport. The ASDE radar is used to monitor and track all arriving and departing aircraft ground traffic and other vehicles moving along the airport's runways and taxiways. The SuperView's output these signals to the tower's specialized, high frequency 21-inch EDL monitors. The devices display these two ASDE radar images, depicting the ground traffic on both sections of the airport, either as side-by-side or overplayed windows. The SuperView multiple window configurations are pre-set to give controller's the entire airport ground traffic view with minimal user intervention, company officials say.
"We are delighted with the SuperView's flexibility to adjust and modify the video signal parameters to support our unique requirement," Maxwell says. "We also like SuperView's exceptional image quality and reliability."
The SuperView multi-input display processor accepts as many as ten real-time inputs and displays the combined output on a single high-resolution monitor or projector. The window inputs can be NTSC or PAL, composite and S-Video, and high-resolution analog RGB with up to 1280 x 1024 pixel resolution. Each window can be independently positioned, scaled to full screen, overlaid with computer graphics or overlapped with other windows. Additionally, the user can pan and zoom within each video image.
For more information on the SuperView video processor from RGB Spectrum contact the company on the World Wide Web at http://www.rgb.com.
Military & Aerospace Electronics
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