ABOUT JETSTAR AIR ROUTE FREQUENCY PREDICTION TOOL FUNCTION: base to aircraft HF communication prediction. REQUIRES: date, T index, Selected Flight Path, ETD, ETA. CONTACT BASE: Aircraft Contact is Brisbane for JetStar Flights. This is the default. FREQUENCY SET:Frequency Set in Kilohertz is locked to 21970 17922 13342 11360 10045 8855 5604 and cannot be changed. DISPLAY FUNCTIONS: FLIGHT PATH Select the flight path from the Departure and Destination drop down city lists. The flight path assumes a great circle route between departue and arrival points. ETD/ETA: Departure and Arrival Times entered as HHMM and are in Universal Time only. Departure and arrival times are to be input as an integer between 0000 and 2400. Departure and Arrival times are used to create a frequency schedule, which appears after the "Do prediction" button is clicked. DO PREDICTION The "Do Prediction" button will run the prediction and produce a time/frequency schedule list for the flight selected, using the input departure and arrival times. results are displayed in a new browser window. CLEAR The "Clear" button clears current input. CHANGE CONTACT AND LOAD NEW CONTACT Used only if contact base is other than Brisbane. Changing the contact base would only be required if JetStar Base station moved from Brisbane or additional base HF station was being used at a future date. See CHANGING THE CONTACT HF base at end of help text. HELP Displays this text in a pop up window. T INDEX: You can select Tmonth, Tday or Taus T indices from the drop down list. Which T index? A choice of T can be selected. The tool starts up with the monthly predicted T value. Tmonth - monthly forecast T index Tday - daily forecast T index (for southern hemisphere) Taus - real time Australian region T index ( a now T index) No data available is indicated by 999. You cant run a prediction with a T of 999. You will need to manually enter a T index value or select another T from the drop down list. No data would be extremely unlikely, but if it occurs it would probably be for the real time T index TAus. Tmonth: For longer term (quiet) planning predictions use the monthly T index which follows the long term solar cycle trend. Monthly T values can be accessed for other months by manually changing the date and then selected Tmonth. Tday: The daily forecast T index is issued each morning (2330UT) by the Australian Space Forecast Centre and should be used for the the Australian region for the current UT day (particularly if the ionosphere is disturbed). If the ionosphere is quiet Tday and T month will be similar. TAus: For real time communications use the Taus index. This index is generated hourly from real time ionospheric data from the IPS data network. Taus is a "now" T index and as such it will have the most variability. How much of a change in T index matters? Changes in T index of 20-30 or more are probably going to be noticable to the user. Small changes of 5 or 10 units will most likely make no difference to prediction output. CHANGING THE CONTACT: (ONLY IF NEW HF BASE STATION IS IMPLEMENTED) If you wish to change the contact this can be done by the following procedure. The contact name is loaded via the "Change Contact" and "Load new Contact" buttons The contact is the point the aircraft communicates with whilst flying along its route. First press the "change new contact" button, a window will appear. Enter the name of the contact (eg Sydney) and press the search button. If found, the full name and latitude and longitude details of the contact will be displayed. To load this contact press the "Load new Contact" button on th main applet. If the location is unknown, you will have to manually enter the contact name, latitude and longitude (degrees east) in the appropriate fields on the main applet. The Location window can be dismissed by closing the window, or by pressing the "Locator" button again.