Concerning the aberration law application in radio navigation and aircraft surveillance

DOI 10.51955/2312-1327_2023_4_63

Evgeny A. Rubtsov

Abstract. The author analyzes the potential use of the aberration law which describes the deviation of measured parameters of an observed object as it changes its position relative to the observer. The law was studied in terms of its application in radio navigation and aircraft surveillance. During research the author obtained dependences of deviations of observable and real (true) characteristics of an observed object for such aids of radio-technical support of flights as a primary radar, distance measuring equipment (DME) and a ground station of automatic dependent surveillance. In doing so, the speed of the observed object was set equal to 250 m/s (typical for existing airplanes) and 600Β m/s (specific for perspective supersonic airplanes). It follows from the calculations that the aberration effect cannot be detected for determining slant range or pulse duration tasks due to the imperfection of the existing measuring instruments. However, the aberration effect can be detected in the tasks of determining the time interval between probing pulses of the primary radar or automatic dependent surveillance messages, as well as in the determination of the frequency of the DME signal. This is achieved due to a sufficiently large dynamic range of the measured values. For the method of evaluating the aberration effect given in the paper the author performed estimation of the sensitivity to the errors of the measured value and the velocity of the observed object. The research confirmed possibility to apply the law of aberration in practice for radio navigation aids and aircraft surveillance, which can increase accuracy of position-fixing and determination of aircraft movement parameters as well as to expand capabilities of the available equipment.

Β Key words: aberration, true parameters, observed parameters, radio navigation aids, aircraft surveillance aids.

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