Eurocontrol Promoting Wide Area Multilateration Surveillance

Eurocontrol is promoting "a broader awareness" of WAM (wide area multilateration) technology for ATC surveillance, pointing to its relatively low cost and good performance.

WAM is a technique where several ground receiving stations listen to signals transmitted from an aircraft and then mathematically calculate its position in three dimensions.

Eurocontrol sees WAM as "an excellent surveillance choice" for both en-route and terminal domains because it provides equal to or better performance than secondary surveillance radar and reduces the use of radio spectrum by passively receiving the majority of its data.  Its proponents also believe WAM to be considerably less expensive to deploy, and note that it can be configured to provide excellent coverage, even in mountainous regions, thus bringing new safety benefits to those areas unsuitable for conventional radars.  Furthermore, WAM doesn't need any additional avionics equipment; it uses signals that already exist today, its advocates say.

At a Eurocontrol-sponsored WAM conference in early June, over 150 people from 30 countries representing air navigation service providers, states, military, industry, airlines and universities, heard representatives from industry, including Sensis, ERA and Roke Manor Research, present information about their products and answered questions from the participants.

Representatives from the Czech, Austrian, Swiss and Armenian air navigation service providers gave details of their WAM Systems, some that are already fully operational or others undergoing final pre-operational trials.

"We are delighted at the success of the workshop," said Mel Rees, who heads Eurocontrol's surveillance division.  "WAM is an important surveillance technique that is now becoming widely available, by sharing our knowledge and experiences we hope to highlight its maturity and to encourage greater deployment of this new, inexpensive, high performance system".

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