Also known as: EUROCAE
EUROCAE (the European Organisation for Civil Aviation Equipment) is the European standards body for aviation electronics. Its ED-102 series mirrors RTCA’s DO-260 ADS-B requirements for use in Europe, under the umbrella of ICAO.1
Overview
EUROCAE, founded in 1963 and based in the Paris area, is a non-profit membership organisation that develops technical standards for civil-aviation equipment in Europe. It plays the same role on the European side that RTCA plays in the United States, and the two work in deliberate partnership: many of their documents are developed jointly so that avionics certified to one apply to the other. Its standards are published as ED- documents, and, like RTCA’s DO- series, they are frequently referenced by the certification authorities — in Europe, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) — giving them regulatory weight.
For surveillance, EUROCAE’s key document is ED-102, the European Minimum Operational Performance Standards for 1090 MHz Extended Squitter ADS-B riding on Mode S. ED-102A is harmonised with RTCA’s DO-260B: the two describe the same message formats, the same position encoding using Compact Position Reporting, and the same integrity reporting, so an aircraft equipped to one standard is understood by ground systems built to the other. That harmonisation is not an accident but the whole point — international aviation requires that a transponder work identically over Europe and North America. The high-level requirements both bodies elaborate come from ICAO’s Annex 10, and the radio spectrum they occupy is allocated internationally by the ITU.
Relevance to SDR
For someone decoding aircraft signals, EUROCAE matters because ADS-B documentation on both continents often cites both ED-102A and DO-260B, and understanding that they are effectively the same specification removes confusion. A decoder built to DO-260B will correctly parse the Extended Squitter messages from a European aircraft certified to ED-102A, because the two are harmonised down to the bit layout — the position, velocity, and identity fields are identical. In practice this means the SDR aircraft-tracking ecosystem is genuinely global: the same open-source decoder and the same crowdsourced networks work over Frankfurt and over Chicago.
Aircraft surveillance falls outside GopherTrunk’s land-mobile trunking focus, so GopherTrunk does not decode ADS-B; that is the domain of dedicated 1090 MHz tools. EUROCAE is included here as the European half of the standards story that makes those signals uniform worldwide. See the other signals you’ll meet lesson for where ADS-B fits among the non-trunking signals an SDR can receive.