The world’s largest wide area multilateration system has been successfully deployed in north west Russia.

The network of geographically distributed stations with high sensitivity and with a real-time update rate of less than 1 second is capable of providing continuous surveillance coverage in all airspace classes, from low altitudes to 20,000 m (60,000 ft.).

The North-West WAM system developed with CRTS Digital Radio Systems equipment, which is considered the largest in the world, consists of 32 widely separated stations and covers about 1 million sq km of airspace.

“The system detects and identifies objects in the 1,000 km zone from west to east and 1,500 km from north to south, providing high-precision surveillance with horizontal position accuracy of 27m en route which exceeds the standard of 350m by a factor of more than 12 and 17m in the TMA instead of 150m as prescribed by the standard,” claimed Yury Kapoyko, MLAT chief designer at CRTS.

The WAM deployment costs are around 234 million rubles (US$3.6 million) and implementation is being headed by Russia’s State ATM Corporation. All CRTS products are developed in compliance with ICAO, RTCA, and EUROCAE standards.