ATC Student Projects

Located close to one of Europe’s largest Airports we are working in close collaboration with the German Air Traffic Control (ATC, Deutsche Flugsicherung DFS GmbH). Within our Cooperative Dual Degree Program (KoSE) which we offer in cooperation with DFS, students who specialize in air navigation services technology (Flugsicherungstechnik) have to conduct a team project related to ATC. Typically, teams of 3-5 students work on a hardware, a software, or a research project. These team projects are typically supervised by both, experts from DFS as well as a professor from h-da.

We at the Centre for Mobile and Wireless Communications (MOWICOM) are particulary interested in ATC technologies related to wireless communications. For example one of our research projects deals with transponder messages transmitted by aircrafts. As all aircrafts share one radio channel in order to transmit their position and status data, this channel is heavily crowded which results in collisions on the radio channel and thus the loss of several messages. As these collided messages cannot be decoded, the extent of the number of lost messages is unknown. In this research project our goal is to estimate the amount of lost surveillance packets. For this purpose a measurement system based on software-defined radios (SDRs) has been developed. Up to now several student teams have been involved in the development of this system.

Other examples of such student team projects are e.g.

• Setup and adaptation of a monitoring software for ATC infrastructure
• Status monitoring of a primary radar system and automatic emergency shutdown
• Automated testing of software developments

Interested students of our KoSE-program should feel free to contact us to get more information. We are looking forward for you.