Real-Time Software & E-Commerce Solutions


 

Racal Avionics

Satellite Communications:
 


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.