A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/740802
NAS VOICE SWITCH (NVS): Jon Shedden (ZFW) represents the NATCA membership as their Article 48 Rep resentative to the NVS project. His report is below. NAS Voice System (NVS) demo labs are currently running on Build 12B. Harris continues to focus on s tability and fixing bugs as we lead up the FAA Stability Demonstration. The Stability Demonstration is the precursor to the beginning of the FAA ' s Factory Acceptance Test (FAT). FAT was scheduled to begin in November 2016, but it has been delayed until Feb ruary of 2017. Harris also continues to work on feature integration. THE FAA Stability Demonstration is scheduled to occur the week of November 14th. Don Schmeichel (NATCA Engineer), Ed Hand (NATCA Engineer), and Mr. Shedden were at the Tech Center on Sep tember 26th evaluating the new ERAM display in conjunction with the larger NVS displays. The NVS and ERAM program offices will continue to work together to resolve the outstanding issues. Chris Lloyd (ZDC), NVS Training Lead, is currently participating in Task And Skills Analysis (TASA) for the controller, supervisor, and configuration specialist user roles on NVS. The 50% Operator Manual was delivered on October 14th. Comments are due November 1st. Mr. Shedden was in Atlantic City and Washington, D.C. , t he week of September 29th for the quarterly NVS Program Management Review (PMR). Mr. Shedden will be in Anchorage and Kenai the week of October 17th to work on NVS requirements for Alaska FSS. Mr. Shedden will be in Seattle the week of October 24th to work on S eattle's Key Site site surveys. Next Generation Air - Ground Communication (NEXCOM) continues deployment of new CM300/350 V2 radios to terminal facilities across the country. Deployment is going well. Testing of a new RCAG at Houston Center (ZHU) has begun. This RCAG will replace the ARINC ' s VHF Extended Range Network (VERN) in Cancun. The FAA successfully replaced the Key West VERN last summer. These RCAG/VERN radios provide long - range directional radio coverage in the Gulf of Mexico. The area rep, Sh awn Sharpless, indicates that initial testing shows the site works as well as the VERN in regards to signal strength and coverage. NAS Voice Recorder Program (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. Key site for NVRP will be Seattle Center in the 2018 time frame. Plantronics was awarded the Headset contract , so almost everything will remain the same. There will be a few headset models that will no longer be available under the new contract due to obsolescence. A briefing on the changes went out to the Service Centers P & R reps and should be distributed to controllers as a briefing item s oon. The Headset Splitt er final design has been completed. The splitter, which is designed to allow three or four headsets to be connected to existing voice switches, should be produced and deployed later this year. A SRM Panel was completed on July 19th and