#airtrafficcontrol
"Canberra company Skykraft launches satellites onboard SpaceX rocket in bid to improve air traffic management".
"The five satellites, manufactured in Canberra, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket."
"The launch is the first of more than 200 satellites set to orbit the Earth during the next two years as part of a project to make air travel safer, smoother and more efficient."
5 doesn't sound so bad, but whenever I see numbers like 200, my immediate thought is "future space junk".
"So it means that in outback Australia or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, pilots will have exactly the same access to air traffic control systems as they would if they were close to Canberra Airport."
Looking for how it works, all I found was this:
"To address the limitations of ground-based infrastructure, Skykraft's space-based Air Traffic Management uses the ADS-B signal to track aircraft movements globally. Skykraft's satellite constellation will also provide VHF voice and data communications between air traffic controllers and aircraft."
ADS-B stands for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, and apparently it's a system that uses GPS to determine the aircraft's position and then broadcast that position. It's called "surveillance" because it can act as a replacement for "surveillance" radar from the ground from air traffic control. So it looks like the satellites can pick up these signals and relay them to the ground. VHF just stands for "very high frequency" and can mean anything in the 30 to 300 megahertz (MHz) range.
