ADS-B Technologies' approach to Air Traffic Management (ATM) is based on our strong belief that we are currently entering a new era in aviation, the Global Satellite Navigation Age, in which the universal application of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B), will trigger changes in global air traffic management on a scale surpassing even that which was seen during the introduction of Radar, more than seventy years ago.
ADS-B Technologies' personnel were some of the first pilots to fly with an FAA certified ADS-B system and since 2004 we have been at the forefront of the technology's deployment, innovation, certification and peripheral design. Our mission for the future is to continue to perfect the technology and develop new applications that will take it well into the 21st Century and beyond.
Far different from radar, which works by bouncing radio waves from fixed terrestrial antennas off of airborne targets and then interpreting the reflected signals, ADS-B uses conventional Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) technology and a relatively simple broadcast communications link as its fundamental components. Also, unlike radar, ADS-B accuracy does not seriously degrade with range, atmospheric conditions, or target altitude and update intervals do not depend on the rotational speed or reliability of mechanical antennas.
In a typical applications, the ADS-B capable aircraft uses an ordinary GNSS (GPS, Galileo, etc) receiver to derive its precise position from the GNSS constellation, then combines that position with any number of aircraft discretes, such as speed, heading, altitude and flight number. This information is then simultaneously broadcast to other ADS-B capable aircraft and to ADS-B ground, or satellite communications transceivers which then relay the aircraft's position and additional information to Air Traffic Control centers in real time.