ITC/USA 2006 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Second Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 23-26, 2006 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / In most current PCM based telemetry systems, an instrumentation engineer manually creates the sampling format. This time consuming and tedious process typically involves manually placing each measurement into the format at the proper sampling rate. The telemetry industry is now moving towards Ethernet-based systems comprised of multiple autonomous data acquisition units, which share a single global time source. The architecture of these network systems greatly simplifies the task of implementing an automatic format generator. Automatic format generation eliminates much of the effort required to create a sampling format because the instrumentation engineer only has to specify the desired sampling rate for each measurement. The system handles the task of organizing the format to comply with the specified sampling rates. This paper examines the issues involved in designing an automatic format generator for a network data acquisition system.

ITC/USA 2009 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fifth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2009 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Configuring a modern, high-performance data acquisition system is typically a very timeconsuming and complex process. Any enhancement to the data acquisition setup software that can reduce the amount of time needed to configure the system is extremely useful. Automatic format generation is one of the most useful enhancements to a data acquisition setup application. By using Automatic Format Generation, an instrumentation engineer can significantly reduce the amount of time that is spent configuring the system while simultaneously gaining much greater flexibility in creating sampling formats. This paper discusses several techniques that can be used to generate sampling formats automatically while making highly efficient use of the system's bandwidth. This allows the user to obtain most of the benefits of a hand-tuned, manually created format without spending excessive time creating it. One of the primary techniques that this paper discusses is an enhancement to the commonly used power-of-two rule, for selecting sampling rates. This allows the system to create formats that use a wider variety of rates. The system is also able to handle groups of related measurements that must follow each other sequentially in the sampling format. This paper will also cover a packet based formatting scheme that organizes measurements based on common sampling rates. Each packet contains a set of measurements that are sampled at a particular rate. A key benefit of using an automatic format generation system with this format is the optimization of sampling rates that are used to achieve the best possible match for each measurement's desired sampling rate.