On Sat, 18 Aug 2007 11:50:00 -0400, NoneYa
wrote:


When you use ancient technology like the FAA the comment
about system overload is real and not a joke. The FAA ground
DME stations routinely overload at major airports(Atlanta is
real bad) because the ancient ITT equipment in the FAA
facilities was only designed to simultaneously interrogate
about 150 aircraft at a time.

After that threshold is reached the system begins to
throttle back and drop targets at the outer range of the DME
equipment. In technical terms the "reply efficiency" drops.

How does the system know which are the outer dme "targets"? Is it
just the weaker dme transmissions that are received by the ground
station that are dropped? Stan