An airborne Collision Avoidance System for low altitude flights using Radio Data System

Radio data system (RDS) is a mature technique which has been developed over the past 20 years. Due to the common use of FM radio, the traits of low estate requirement and the convenience in broadcasting, RDS is suitable for using in wireless transmission of large-range and low-load data. This article proposes the application of RDS in the traffic collision avoidance system (TCAS) for low altitude flights. The real-time surveillance information from the airport control center of low altitude flights can be wirelessly transmitted in real time to the RDS receiver in the aircrafts. Because of the low-price of RDS broadcast station and the widespread of RDS receiver contributed by the application of RDS-TMC for cars navigation system in recent years, using RDS as the redundancy communication system in low altitude flights is plausible in almost every aspect. Nevertheless, one thing leaves to be desired is the slow transferring speed (1187.5 bps) of RDS, which is amended in this research by particularly designed data format to reduce the information load in each transmission. As a result, the application proposed in this paper can be feasible.