LUNAR AMHS Terminal

The AMHS Terminal is an ICAO SARPs compliant X.400 User Agent, which allows end users to connect to the AMHS to send and receive ATC messages. It has been specifically designed with the needs of ATS operators in mind, providing a full set of ICAO 4444 forms.

As an X.400 User Agent, it can also be used to send and receive free text messages, including attachments and multiple body parts.

Running under many operating systems, the AMHS Terminal presents a consistent Graphical User Interface design.

General features

• Use of advance features of the X.400 P7 protocol, such as auto alerts and Message Store filters.
• Local message caching to prevent fetching repeated messages and to avoid loading the Message Store
• HTML support in X.400
• Contact manager with tags for favourite users, access to the ATN X.500 Directory for address browsing and synchronization, local user groups, AFTN/AMHS Address Conversion and many other features
• Also supports POP, IMAP and SMTP, with SSL and STARTTLS
• Supports multiple accounts, of any type, at the same time, so it's ideal for environments where computers are shared by several users.
• Sorting of messages in a folder ( Subject, Sender, Recipient and size)
• Drag and drop of messages to folders
• Multi-language interface (English and Spanish by default, more can be added)
• Filtering of messages based on search criteria
• Support for sending X.400 Probes
• Support for SSL over X.400 P7 (ITOTS), to connect directly to, for example, Business Mail X.400 Mailbox.

Aviation-specific features

• Creation of ICAO 4444 messages using familiar forms for: FPL, SPL, ARR, DEP, CNL, DLA, RQM, RQS, RQP, CHG, CPL, EST, CND, ACP, ALR, RCF, SPL, ASP, AFP, NOTAM, NOTAMC, NOTAMR.
• New form to create FPL2012 messages (Flight Plan with the new 2012 format)
• Flexible AFTN ↔ AMHS address conversion, using either an ICAO compliant X.500 ATN Directory, or the EUROCONTROL AMC Tables with conversion information.
• Supports both ICAO XF and CAAS addressing schemes
• Support of the generation and reception of messages in both Basic Encoding and Extended Encoding
• Supports all the Extended ATS Message Handling Service functional groups - Basic + IHE + DIR + FTBP + SEC.
• [FTBP] Supports the use of File Transfer Bodyparts, to handle message attachments. This can be used, for example, to send and receive METAR, SPECI and TAF messages using the BUFR format.
• [IHE] Support of the generation and reception of messages in with IPM Heading Extensions
• [DIR] Supports the use of Directory to access the X.500 ATN Directory to search for users and determine their capabilities, for example, if they support IHE or FTBP for AFTN ↔ AMHS address conversion
• [SEC] Support for the SEC functional group
• Digital Signatures to verify the originator of a message
• MOAC (Message Origin Authentication and Content Integrity) to verify that the message has not been corrupted or tampered with in transit.
• Message Sequence Integrity, to alert the user of missing messages.

Connectivity

The connection to the AMHS Switch can be achieved through the use of the standard Internet Protocol (IP) sockets, or by using the full OSI stack to connect to an ATN Router. Both IPv4 and IPv6 are supported.

Availability

The LUNAR AMHS Terminal runs on Windows (all versions from Windows 2003 and later), Linux (Redhat, Ubuntu, and other similar Open Source operating systems) and Sun Solaris.

Conformance

• ICAO Doc 9880 (supersedes ICAO Doc 9705)
• Extended ATS Message Handing Services