FAA-NWS NADIN II Pacific Islands Circuits

Description Page

The NWS Headquarters & Pacific Region, and Headquarters FAA are in a joint effort to establish a new communications connectivity for islands in the Pacific. The backbone for the main communications path is with the use of the FAA NADIN II X.25 packet switch network, with branches from CONUS HUBs into the Pacific. The communication system extensions will be carried over lines established with FAA and/or NWS Pacific Region financing, with some funding provided by the Department of Interior. The initial upgrade requirements were established by Pacific Region to help upgrade the communications and reduce leased/maintenance costs by removing the old slow speed communications circuits being used, which were left over from WW II. The FAA is taking this opportunity to provide, for the first time ever, communications from many of these islands for submssion of flight plans and notems by electronic means, and to be reachable for delivery of needed aviation flight notices.

The islands involved in the communications upgrade are:

Communication Circuits

Configuration of the system consists of multiple X.25 logical connections through the NADIN II network at Western U.S. exit points to extension links from Salt Lake City NADIN II Hub through either the Diamond Head Hawaii NADIN II Hub or the Okland California NADIN II Hub of the NADIN II System. The overall NWS interface to NADIN II at the NWS Washington Regional Telecommunication Hub (Silver Spring, MD) from both Leesburg, VA NADIN II Hub (ZDC) and New York, NY NADIN II Hub (ZNY) permits the NWS Gateway to interface directly with the islands in the Pacific Ocean and exchange meteorological data with them based upon their requirements.

Island Site Systems

The FAA workstation hardware in the islands are Gateway 2000 systems running DOS with Windows 3.1.1 for Workgroups. The communications architecture consists of the X.25 communications protocol on lines through EiCON Internal interface X.25 cards in the Gateway systems. The Gateway software for data reciept and storage was written by the FAA Technical Laboratory in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Some of the FAA Gateway systems are DOS based without Windows for a more basic system solution. The workstations in the Micronesian Islands are the "DOS only" versions.

The FAA Gateway 2000 systems can interface the NWS MAPSO computer systems and the Micro-Art upper air processing system for transmission of locally generated observations. This permits direct transfer of data without manual intervention. The FAA Gateway systems display the received data on the screen, which scrolls the data received, and can print the desired messages to a local printer (model specified by FAA). The systems store the messages for archive purposes and for later retrieval if needed.

The Gateway 2000 software was written to permit direct input of text messages. The local operator can build or import and store templates in the Windows software for each data message type desired. This allows for later retrieval of a message format when building a message for transmission. This template can also includes the communications header information required. The header can be either the AFTN or the GTS message header string.