The system enhances flight safety by providing the air traffic controllers with information of air movements from radar, flight plans, direction finders and air-ground-data link messages.
It was powered by a four-cylinder piston engine driving a pusher propeller, had fixed landing gear, and a pancake-shaped data link antenna on its back.
These perform data link functions such as adding a packet header to prepare it for transmission, then actually transmit the frame over a physical medium.
The payload sensors communicate with the ground control station in real-time, using either direct line of sight data link, or via an airborne/satellite relay.
At the receiving end of the data link a complementary "demultiplexer" is normally required to break single data stream back down into the original streams.