Aireon LLC

Itt Manufacturing Enterprises, Inc.

Exelis Inc.

Boris Veytsman

Michael A Garcia

Ronald C Bruno

Jay Minnix

Robert P Mueller

Richard S Orr

Eric Innis

In one implementation, satellite coverage provisioning for a service area may be performed by updating power consumption states for satellites in a constellation of satellites and determining whether each satellite of the constellation is required to be in the minimal power consumption mode based on its updated power consumption state. For satellites that are not required to be in the minimal power consumption mode, a power consumption score may be calculated and these satellites may be sorted according to their respective power consumption scores. Based on the sorted order, it may be determined whether at least some of these satellites can be put into a reduced power consumption mode based on their respective power consumption scores and coverage of the service area. Then it may be determined if each of the satellites that are in the reduced power consumption mode can be put into the minimal power consumption mode.

Provisioning satellite coverage

In one implementation, a method for scheduling beams of an antenna on a satellite during a defined time period includes calculating a beam score for each beam based on the expected gain of the beam and determining that the number of beams having non-zero beam scores during the defined time period is less than a threshold value. In addition, the method also includes accessing a set of beam weights for each of multiple different candidate beam patterns, and, for each set of weights, multiplying individual beam weights by corresponding beam scores, and generating a candidate beam pattern score by calculating a sum of the products of the beam weights and corresponding beam scores. The method further includes comparing the candidate beam pattern scores, selecting a particular one of the candidate beam patterns, and scheduling the selected beam pattern for the defined time period.

Scheduling beams of a satelite antenna

A technique for reducing altitude error involves determining a corrected altitude for an aircraft using forecast atmospheric pressure data available, for example, from a weather forecasting service. The forecast atmospheric pressure data includes, for a number of points in time and for a number of geographic locations, a set of pressure levels and corresponding altitude values. Altitude correction data is periodically calculated from the forecast atmospheric pressure data for each of a number of geographic grid points. Upon receiving aircraft position information and an aircraft altitude measurement for an aircraft, one or more of the geographic grid points corresponding to the aircraft position are identified, and a corrected altitude of the aircraft is determined based on the altitude correction data of the one or more geographic grid points.

Reduction of altitude error using forecasted atmospheric pressure data

System and methods for reducing redundant messages broadcast in an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system. For a given target, a controller determines the relevant customers that should receive information about the target, identifies all of the ground stations that can be satisfactorily heard by the relevant customers, and then identifies a smaller subset of ground stations by selecting only those ground stations that are needed to reach all of the relevant customers. ADS-B messages are then broadcast to the relevant customers using only the smaller subset of ground stations.

Transmission scheduling for ADS-B ground systems

CDMA codes are multiplexed into a constant-envelope composite signal using weighted majority logic. Based on a commanded power allocation among the signal codes, each signal code is assigned a weighting coefficient dictating the voting power the signal code has each time a vote is conducted, in a manner analogous to corporate shareholder voting. To multiplex the signal codes, a majority vote is conducted each chip period by summing the weighted chip values of the signal codes and assigning a binary value to the majority-voted composite chip based on the sign of the sum. An RF carrier is modulated in accordance with the value of the composite chip. The desired power distribution is achieved by requiring the power ratio of each signal code to be proportional to the square of the expected value of the cross-correlation between the signal code and a stored replica of the signal code at the receiver.

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Reston, VA, United States of America

Boris Veytsman