Knowledge Bank

Modern military tactics rely on small lightweight ground forces working in close conjunction with air support. To this end, a transponder based system has been employed since the 1960’s to provide aircrews with positional awareness of any friendly ground troops in the combat zone. However, airborne radar systems designed for tracking ground based radio transponders have seen very little revision since the original versions were produced in the 1960’s. As a result, current implementations are heavy, slow, large, expensive, unreliable and limited in capability. These characteristics are undesirable on airborne platforms where weight, size, and power constraints are tightly controlled. In this thesis, a GPS-like approach is proposed to calculate the location of one or more beacons based on several samples of the observing aircraft’s position, and the round trip delay of pulses sent to the beacons. We examine the feasibility of the approach and detail a proof-of-concept system for performing field measurements.