FAA, flight checks and drones
I spent most of my FAA career in field installation work. The last major project I worked was a new Airport Traffic Control Tower at Broomfield, Colorado. This was to replace an existing ATCT that was poorly positioned and too short to view one of the entire runways. I had only a portion of the engineering work assigned to me, which was installation of communications and RADAR. The RADAR work there consisted of a display system that is fed out of Denver International Airport. The project was a great success for all involved. During the review of the antenna placement on the roof, I was concerned about the possibility of multipath because the air-to-ground communications uses a very old form of modulation, AM, that is particularly susceptible to multipath. Multipath is a condition where the signal transmitted by an antenna is reflected so that there are multiple transmission paths of differing lengths between the receiver and transmitter. So, the...