Ligado Pitching Aviation GPS Compliance Plan to FAA

Ligado is discussing with the Federal Aviation Administration how it anticipates individually assessing each proposed base station before deployment to determine the power limits needed to ensure it meets FAA requirements for protecting certified aviation GPS receivers, the company said in an FCC ex parte filing posted Friday in docket 11-109. It recapped a meeting between Ligado board member/ex-FCC Chairman Reed Hundt and Wireless and International bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology staff to update the FCC on the talks with the FAA. The company pledged its operations always will defer to FAA requirements for protecting aviation receivers, and said it proposed in its FAA discussions using a "standoff cylinder" for base station assessment of a 250-foot horizontal radius from the base station and extending to 30 feet above the station's antenna, and that it would use an FAA-approved model for calculating power limits needed to ensure all received power at or beyond that standoff cylinder is below the agency's interference threshold. That model also would include procedures for assessing aggregate effects of the base station and other Ligado base stations nearby, it said. Ligado said the base station power limit would be set by "worst-case performance" calculated under the model. The company said it also discussed with the FCC its proposed business plan, which would focus on connectivity for mission-critical IoT applications and 5G rather than the 4G coverage plans its predecessor company, LightSquared, had. Ligado said it expects its ground-based network could include 10,000 to 20,000 base stations, fewer than half anticipated by LightSquared, with many of them being micro sites operating at reduced power.