NATCA Bookshelf

NAS VOICE SWITCH (NVS) Jon Shedden (ZFW) is the NATCA Article 114 Representative to the NVS project. His report is below: The NAS Voice System (NVS) schedule has officially slipped. The FAA and Harris continue to work on a resolution. Next Generation Air-Ground Communication (NEXCOM) NEXCOM continues the deployment of new CM300/350 V2 radios to terminal facilities across the country. Some terminal facilities in the NAS are using very old radios and hear a pop back or "squelch tail" when they release their transmitters. The new radios being deployed under NEXCOM Segment 2 do not have this "feature" as the squelch tail is generally regarded as undesirable in radio communications. This issue has cropped up twice now during deployment, and the program office should brief future affected facilities prior to install. The NEXCOM program office has kicked off the Emergency Transceiver Replacement. This program is looking to replace aging tunable transceivers at DEN, HNL, PCT, PHX, SCT, and SLC. They are also looking to replace approximately 2000 grab-and-go style emergency transceivers (e.g. PET-2000). NAS Voice Recorder Program (NVRP) NVRP is the replacement for existing NAS voice recorders (DALR, DALR2, DVRS, DVR2). The program office presented to the JRC and received approval to proceed to Final Investment Analysis, leading up to the Final Investment Decision. We continue to work through vendor evaluations. Grand Rapids Tower/TRACON (GRR) GRR is reporting multiple issues with their aging voice switch. There's one outstanding issue where a RADAR site is causing interference in the Tower Cab. Tech Ops continues to correct grounding issues to resolve this problem. GRR is also expecting to receive a replacement voice switch, the Interim Voice Switch Replacement (IVSR), in 2019. Tone Mitigation National Workgroup The workgroup first met in September 2017 to discuss potential mitigations to the number and severity of tone/noise events across the NAS. This workgroup kicked off largely because of the number of tone/noise events occurring at PCT. One of the outcomes from these meetings was exploring the use of new headset bases which incorporate an active limiter. PCT has completed their evaluation of the active limiting headset bases. Testing will now move on to several more facilities. The FAA will be conducting Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) to Internet Protocol (IP) conversion in the Bangor, Maine area in the coming months. This technology will assist the FAA as local telco providers move away from legacy TDM services to IP services.

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