DSP Techniques in Airborne Navigational Aids - an Example of Cooperation with Industry

by Andrew Kun and Kent Chamberlin

The UNH Electrical and Computer Engineering Department has always had a strong commitment to cooperation with industry. This article presents one very successful instance of such cooperation.

In early 1995 UNH professor Kent Chamberlin was approached by a former student of his with a question. Could the UNH ECE Department help his company, Airfield Technology of Olathe, KS, design a digital signal processor (DSP) based instrument for airborne evaluation of ground-based radio navigational aids? The problem with the existing instruments, produced by other companies, was that they were very expensive (on the order of $500,000 a piece) partly due to the fact that they used analog electronics. The tight required tolerances of the instrument output were impossible to meet without some expensive electronics wizardry. Another problem with the traditional instruments was that they needed in-flight calibration between measurements, which made them inconvenient to use.

Kent said sure, we can do it! He talked to professor Tom Miller and graduate student Andrew Kun, and soon the project was well under way. The result was a program running on a commercial DSP board, which became the DSP engine of Airfield Technology's new navaid instrument. Thanks to utilizing DSP technology the new product is very accurate, and it does not need constant recalibration. And the price? It is approximately half of what the traditional instruments cost.