Spodman, you resort to personal attack again - i.e. you state that I “really don’t have a clue” but don’t come up with any facts.
I have stated that the FAA plans to keep all secondary surveillance radars right across the USA to provide a secondary surveillance radar back up service above FL180 when ADS-B is fully installed.
In response to this you state:
It is misleading statements like this that get me steamed about you
However you provide no evidence. I can assure you I have spoken to people at the FAA and their document makes it quite clear that they are going to keep the secondary surveillance radars to provide a radar service above FL180 after ADS-B is installed.
You say my statement is misleading. Where is your evidence? Are you actually stating that the FAA proposes to close down all its secondary surveillance enroute radars in a similar way to the Australian proposal? It is as if you know that I am stating a fact, and because it works against your belief system, you will simply personally attack me rather than address this important issue.
I can assure you that at the present time, I wouldn’t like to see an enroute system that is totally based on GPS, and if the GPS system goes out we have no surveillance at all. At the present time if one SSR head goes out we have others, and there is a portable unit which can be brought in to replace it. Everything else is backed up (i.e. power supplies, links etc).
The multilateration system which is being installed in Tasmania has backed up power supplies and multiple outlets so if one goes down, the system will still fundamentally work. The multilateration system is not based on the GPS system working.
Why isn’t Airservices telling us how that system is going and advising why they have spent such a fortune on the system, if they are not planning to take notice of its performance and compare it with ADS-B, which requires operation of the GPS constellation?