eDME On Air: Design, Implementation, and Flight-Test Demonstration

Wouter Pelgrum, Kuangmin Li, Adam Naab-Levy, Achim Soelter, George Weida, Arthur Helwig

Abstract:	The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not to be construed as official or reflecting the views of the Federal Aviation Administration or Department of Transportation. ABSTRACT With the introduction of Performance-Based Navigation (PBN) in NextGen and SESAR there is a significant increase in navigation performance requirements. GNSS has become the cornerstone of future aviation navigation, and through ADS-B also of aviation surveillance. However, GNSS’ vulnerability to interference and jamming necessitates an Alternate Positioning Navigation and Timing or APNT solution that can meet the PBN performance requirements. Some of the candidate APNT architectures provide enhancements to the Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) architecture as the legacy DME/N system’s performance is unlikely to meet the stringent APNT performance criteria (e.g. RNP 0.3). Various enabling technologies are proposed to enhance the DME performance from the legacy DME/N to an enhanced DME (eDME) system [1]. Key eDME technologies that are discussed in this paper include eDME carrier phase [2], beat signal broadcast [3], and data broadcast. The paper discusses a proposed eDME Signal-In-Space design, a prototype eDME system implementation, the Signal-In-Space validation of that prototype system, and the results of a flight-test demonstration of the system.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 2015 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 26 - 28, 2015 Laguna Cliffs Marriott Dana Point, California
Pages:	40 - 61
Cite this article:	Pelgrum, Wouter, Li, Kuangmin, Naab-Levy, Adam, Soelter, Achim, Weida, George, Helwig, Arthur, "eDME On Air: Design, Implementation, and Flight-Test Demonstration," Proceedings of the 2015 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, Dana Point, California, January 2015, pp. 40-61.
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