Design 2000 receives order from Airservices Australia to design and manufacture Audio Path Selector cards and chassis for Airport Instrument Landing Systems
Design 2000 has a long history of making specialised communications equipment for Airservices Australia. Airservices is a government owned organisation providing safe, secure, efficient and environmentally responsible services to the Australian aviation industry. They provide aeronautical data, telecommunications, navigation services and aviation rescue fire fighting services.
As part of a $1 billion investment over five years in upgrading and modernising infrastructure and facilities across Australia, Airservices is currently involved in the Perth Optic Fibre Project at Perth Airport. A critical part of the upgrade is to provide redundant fibre optic paths for Instrument Landing Systems. Design 2000 was chosen to develop the Flight Path Audio Path Selector (APS) which automatically switches between two full duplex FSK audio signals for each runway Instrument Landing System. The system selects the strongest signal for maximum reliability and provides redundancy in the event of a fibre optic or twisted pair copper cable failure, or a power supply failure.
Terry Richards as Technical Authority for Multiplexers at Airservices stated "I compliment the people at Design2000 for a job well done." The APS project was managed by Kent Jiang from Project Planning at Airservices Australia. The same redundancy for Instrument Landing Systems is expected to be rolled out at other Australian airports with Cairns and Melbourne next in line.
"The APS project from a technical viewpoint was a particularly interesting one. The spec called for continuous operation even during a complete power-fail situation so early 20th century telephony passive hybrid coil technology had to be revisited and implemented in the front end with mechanical change-over relays redirecting the audio path. When powered up, after the two to four wire conversion and buffering, a Digital Signal Processor or DSP was implemented as a highly accurate and fast acting programmable comparator. The combination of some of the oldest and newest technologies on the one line card makes this product quite unique." said Ross Kells from Engineering Services at Design 2000.
