NATCA Bookshelf

STARS Hardware – Mr. Ness attended a slatwall event at the Tech Center in Atlantic City, N.J., in mid-November. Slatwall is a new workstation concept already deployed at sites such as Cleveland and Las Vegas. The purpose of this meeting was to finalize fit checks of Raytheon components on final design Russ Bassett and Evans slatwall consoles. NATCA feedback centered on eliminating light pass-through, acoustics and cable retention for vital components. TAMR Deployment and Common Terminal Digitizer (CTD) Update Submitted by Jim VanZee (GRR) Thanksgiving and the rest of the holiday season are upon us! For TAMR, that typically signifies a marked slowdown in activities as stakeholders have leave planned and moratorium periods approach for non-essential work. That being said, we were able to successfully complete three ARTS to STARS transition events since the last update with Florence (FLO), Elmira (ELM), and Erie (ERI) attaining Initial Operating Capacity. Of significance in those transitions was ERI, who closed their TRACON for the last time on ARTS and took the airspace back from ZOB the next morning at the new Erie Sector at BUF – representing the second successful consolidation of facilities under Section 804. Those transitions were the final ones for the calendar year. At this point, there are only 10 FAA facilities in the NAS left to transition to STARS during 2019. The CTD program continues to deploy the new digitizer hardware/software for the ASR-8 sites into the NAS, with successful IOCs at both FLO and ELM. A new software build that is expected to help mitigate the presentation of false weather (AP) on STARS is showing promising initial looks, and testing and evaluation will continue until at least early January 2019 prior to keysite deployment later in the year. TAMR Operational Support Facilities (OSF) Update Submitted by Scott Kendrick (North Texas- OSF) TSAS/TBFM – On Nov. 5-9, I attended the TIAB (TBFM in A Box) training and requirements meeting for OSF/Site support in Denver. The requirements to connect TIAB to STARS within the OSFs were detailed, as well as how to accomplish training to use the simulator. Software Planning Board (SPB) – Stakeholders are being asked to agree to the initial software build content for STARS S8R2. We are prioritizing current content that moved from R11 and delaying fixes to the software build S8R2. Operating Testing and Evaluation (OT&E) – OSF SMEs from SEOSF and DVOSF attended TIAB (TBFM in the Box) for the S6R8 RM OT&E. Nov. 27 starts the RM OT&E for the R8 software build and continues until Dec. 14. Program Trouble Report Working Group (PTRWG) – At the November meeting, stakeholders ranked new PTRs and reviewed the watch list and several other PTRs that were already ranked.

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