News

ATCALs updates 50+ year old equipment

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Jared Duhon
  • 436th Airlift Wing Public Affairs
DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. --  Dover AFB officially ended a $1.3 million project updating equipment. The 15-month long project led by the 436th Operations Support Squadron in partnership with the 436th Contracting Squadron, the 436th Civil Engineer Squadron, the 436th Communication Squadron and private contractors was completed this month.

Dover AFB is now the first base in AMC to have state-of-the-art radios and ATC infrastructure.

"The project began by advocating for funds from the Air Mobility Command over a year ago, and by this time last year we finally were funded," said 1st Lt. Maris Glenn, 436th OSS Airfield Operations director of operations. "Contracting expedited the contracting processes, and we broke ground in April 2017 in partnership with Technica and ADB companies."

ADB Companies and the 436th OSS’s Air Traffic Control and Landing Systems worked tirelessly to install $540 thousand worth of state-of-the-art radios, replacing equipment that dates to the 1950s and consolidates transmission and reception sites to a single facility, called the Ground to Air Transmit Receive site or GATR.

"All of the output, or what is going to the aircraft, was at the transmitter site," said Senior Airman Cory Brundage, 436th OSS airfield systems journeymen. "While all of the input, going to the air traffic control site is the receiver site.”

As stated before, the gear was from the 1950s, some showing a last certified date of 1969. The project was modernization in two ways, the radios themselves as well as the infrastructure changing old outdated copper with new more effective fiber optics.

"The benefit of upgrading is that fiber has no loss of signal, no electromagnetic interference,” said Brundage. “While copper has tons of signal loss and has a lot of EMI, even with proper grounding. Copper was great in 1955, but it is the 21st Century.”