Americom Government Services (AGS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of SES Americom, last week announced it was awarded a 10-year contract through Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Services to support the Federal Aviation Administration‘s (FAA) space-based navigation services. Financial terms of the contract were not disclosed.

Leslie Blaker, vice president of development at Americom Government Services, told Satellite News that the contract called for the company to install, operate and maintain two standard A uplink systems, one in Woodbine, MD, and one in Brewster, WA. The service will support the Geostationary Communications and Control Segment of the FAA’s Wide Area Augmentation Systems.

The WAAS provides augmentation information to GPS/WAAS receivers to enhance the accuracy and reliability of GPS position estimates. The signals from GPS satellites are received across the National Airspace System (NAS) at widely-spaced wide-area reference stations. Each reference station relays the information, via a terrestrial communication network, to WAAS wide-area master stations. The master stations use the information collected by the reference stations to develop corrections to the GPS position information. These corrections are sent to a ground uplink station where they are transmitted in the form of a WAAS correction message to geostationary Earth-orbit (GEO) satellites. These GEOs broadcast the WAAS message to users across the continental United States and portions of Alaska, on the same frequency as GPS. The WAAS broadcast message improves GPS signal accuracy from 20 meters to approximately 1.5 to 2 meters in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, allowing more efficient arrival, en route and departure operations.

Additionally, WAAS provides indications to GPS/WAAS receivers of where the GPS system is unusable due to system errors or other effects, such as the recent solar flares that disrupted communications on Earth. Further, the WAAS system is designed to strict safety standards –users are notified within six seconds of any issuance of hazardously misleading information that would cause an error in the GPS position estimate. (For a visual presentation on how WAAS works, see http://gps.faa.gov/GPSbasics/index.htm)

Contract Details

In simple terms, Americom Government Services is “providing the link between the GPS system and the FAA, keeping a steady flow of GPS data from the GPS constellation to the FAA uplink sites which are a part of the WAAS,” Blaker said of AGS’ role as defined by the contract.

The system will not require any significant research & development to deploy (Blaker said the system should be installed and running early in the fourth quarter of this year); it will be used exclusively for WAAS support.

“There is nothing that unique in the system other than these are standard A terminals, which are considerably larger [than normal],” Blaker said. “These are 16.4-meter uplink sites. What is important here is the amount of reliability, the availability of the network infrastructure and the quality of our processes in terms of making sure, given that we are operating and maintaining these stations, that we are going to provide the full 24-hour-a-day, seven days a week operations.” One of the sites will serve as the main site, with the other ones being the back-up, but AGS has not decided which will be the main site yet.

“This system is dedicated completely to [the WAAS] application,” Blaker added. “A traditional teleport can be used for multiple customers. But because of the quality that is needed for maintaining the stations for this service, there will be no other customers on this to make sure there is no possibility of interference or other concerns that you could have with traditional teleport operations.”

And while there is not much unique about the services AGS is offering, the contract itself is a bit of a novelty as far as government satellite contracts go.

–Gregory Twachtman (Leslie Blaker, AGS, 703/517-9201)