Racal Avionics Ltd., London, England.
The
Honeywell/Racal multi-channel SATCOM project brought significant
marketing, operational and safety benefits to airlines by
providing high quality, reliable voice and data communications
throughout the world.
The
Inmarsat geostationary satellites provided overlapping,
worldwide coverage. For air-to-ground
communications, voice, fax or data are transmitted from
the aircraft to the appropriate Inmarsat satellite that
covers the region in which the aircraft is flying. The satellite
transmits to a Ground Earth Station (GES) owned by a service
provider who then sends the message out over standard voice
or data telecommunications networks to its destination.
For ground-to-air communications, the process is simply
reversed.
Gyrosystem
was contracted to develop the interface to the Radio Frequency
Unit (receiving ARINC-429) within a Satellite Data Unit
(Motorol 68020 based) for the Ground Earth Station.
The SATCOM project used Inmarsat protocols and standards
derived from ANSI-C, D0-178A, BS5750-13 (ISO9000-3),
and Yourdon / MASCOT-3 methodologies. Tested the software
(written in C) using in-target tools RTscope and RTsource
(from the VRTX operating system) and with VAX based software
debuggers. Additionally assisted with Verification
and Validation on the requirements/ specifications, detailed
design and corresponding code from various functional areas
of the project.