A tactical air navigation system, commonly referred to by the acronym TACAN, is a navigation system used by military aircraft. It provides the user with bearing and distance (slant-range or hypotenuse) to a ground or ship-borne station. It is a more accurate version of the VOR/DME system that provides bearing and range information for civil aviation. The DME portion of the TACAN system is available for civil use; at VORTAC facilities where a VOR is combined with a TACAN, civil aircraft can receive VOR/DME readings. Aircraft equipped with TACAN avionics can use this system for en route navigation as well as non-precision approaches to landing fields. The Space Shuttle is one such vehicle that was designed to use TACAN navigation but later upgraded with GPS as a replacement.
The typical TACAN onboard user panel has control switches for setting the channel (corresponding to the desired surface station's assigned frequency), the operation mode for either transmit/receive (T/R, to get both bearing and range) or receive only (REC, to get bearing but not range). Capability was later upgraded to include an air-to-air mode (A/A) where two airborne users can get relative slant-range information. Depending on the installation, Air-to-Air mode may provide range, closure (relative velocity of the other unit), and bearing, though an air-to-air bearing is noticeably less precise than a ground-to-air bearing. A TACAN only equipped aircraft cannot receive bearing information from a VOR only station.
The TACAN navigation system is an evolution of radio transponder navigation systems that date back to the British Oboe system of World War II. In the United States, many companies were involved with the development of TACAN for military aircraft. Hoffman Laboratories Div. of the Hoffman Electronics Corp.–Military Products Division (now NavCom Defense Electronics) was a leader in developing the present TACAN system in the US starting in the late 1950s.
TACAN in general can be described as the military version of the VOR/DME system.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 3 hertz (Hz) and 3,000 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmitter connected to an antenna which radiates the waves, and received by another antenna connected to a radio receiver. Radio is widely used in modern technology, in radio communication, radar, radio navigation, remote control, remote sensing, and other applications.
Very High Frequency Omnirange Station (VOR) is a type of short-range radio navigation system for aircraft, enabling aircraft with a receiving unit to determine its position and stay on course by receiving radio signals transmitted by a network of fixed ground radio beacons. It uses frequencies in the very high frequency (VHF) band from 108.00 to 117.95 MHz. Developed in the United States beginning in 1937 and deployed by 1946, VOR became the standard air navigational system in the world, used by both commercial and general aviation, until supplanted by satellite navigation systems such as GPS in the early 21st century.
The basic principles of air navigation are identical to general navigation, which includes the process of planning, recording, and controlling the movement of a craft from one place to another. Successful air navigation involves piloting an aircraft from place to place without getting lost, not breaking the laws applying to aircraft, or endangering the safety of those on board or on the ground. Air navigation differs from the navigation of surface craft in several ways; Aircraft travel at relatively high speeds, leaving less time to calculate their position en route.
Modern media data such as 360 degrees videos and light field (LF) images are typically captured in much higher dimensions than the observers' visual displays. To efficiently browse high-dimensional media, a navigational streaming model is considered: a cli ...
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely deployed in air navigation, where numerous applications use them for safety-of-life and positioning, navigation, and timing tasks. Consequently, GPS spoofing attacks are more and more frequent. The aim of this wor ...
Springer, Cham2022
The Vehicle Dynamic Model (VDM) based navigation of fixed-wing drones determines the airborne trajectory in conjunction with Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors. Without Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals, this method estimates navigati ...