Design and use of “Drone” to support the radio navigation aids flight inspection

This paper presents an unmanned aerial system (UAS) for preliminary validation of radio navigation aids before an actual flight inspection is performed. The invented UAS consists of two parts. Firstly, a novel electromagnetic interference-free (EMI-free) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), also known as drone. This UAV aims to avoid EMI noise which is a major issue of onboard electronic hardware and radio frequency system to malfunction or even fail. Secondly, a real-time radio navigation receiver is built and mounted on UAV. The implementation of this receiver is based on software-defined radio (SDR) platform using universal software radio peripheral (USRP) hardware and GNU radio software. Finally, we carried out the performance evaluation of this work in two scenarios which are the laboratory test for evaluating receiver module accuracy and precision as well as the field test for assessing overall invented UAS performance at Nakhon Ratchasima airport, Thailand.