Russ, I want to help you with your “origins of ADS-B” portion of your article. Briefly, the UAT was invented by The MITRE Corporation in the mid-1990s as a full-featured low-cost ADS-B/FIS-B/TIS-B solution for GA that would not further congest the 1090 band. In the late 90’s, the Tomorrow (sp?) Corporation in Salem developed the first commercial prototypes with MITRE for use by the FAA’s Capstone program in Alaska and SafeFlight21 program in the lower 48. UPS, as a forwarding thinking organization purchased Tomorrow and renamed the company as UPS Aviation Technologies (UPS-AT). UPS was very active testing ADS-B with the SafeFlight 21 program. UPS-AT was later purchased by Garmin and was named Garmin-AT. MITRE continued to support the Capstone and Safeflight 21 programs until 2007, when the FAA created a national ADS-B program. 1090 ADS-B had a very different development and implementation history.
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