Air Traffic Control Fully Certified
Communication Breakdown; Situational Awareness; Troubleshooting
ATC Issue All Types; Conflict Airborne Conflict; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Published Material / Policy
Air Traffic Control Issued New Clearance
I was working Finals and while controlling about 7 aircraft; my frequency transmitter was stuck on. At first I wasn't sure if it was a stuck microphone or our own transmitter. We've been having many issues with the frequencies and have called them out numerous times in the last 2 months. I went to standby transmitter/receiver and nothing changed. I called the Supervisor over and asked him to get me extra airspace since I was going to get backed up already due to complexity/volume and to tell feeder sectors to not switch any more aircraft until I could solve the issue or get to a backup frequency. I just tried to work over the transmitter issue. I could barely hear the aircraft; but they were following directions so I kept working while trying to communicate with the supervisor. I ended up having an overtake with Aircraft X and Aircraft Y. I did tell Aircraft X to slow twice; but did not and could not hear the readback. Separation was lost down to about 1.4 mile. Although not a large gap between standard ILS to ILS separations; the frequency issue that caused it is the reason I am writing this report. I plan on filing another systemic report on the lack of repair of our radios and believe that this situation ended up OK; but it adds a large amount of risk to the NAS to use frequencies that do not work with our traffic volume. The only thing I did not do; was go to the ECS frequency transmitter/receiver. I believe that our frequency issues need to get resolved. We have had to deal with this many times in the last month; only to be told to go back to it and is should work. That is unacceptable due to our volume of aircraft and complexity of airspace/aircraft types including foreign air carriers and language barriers.
A TRACON Controller reported that two aircraft on short final lost appropriate spacing due to an aircraft overtake when the the Controller's primary and backup radio failed.