ITC/USA 2014 Conference Proceedings / The Fiftieth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 20-23, 2014 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, CA / Typical airborne test platforms use multiple telemetry transmit antennas in a top and bottom configuration in order to mitigate signal shadowing during maneuvers on high dynamic platforms. While mitigating one problem, this also creates a co-channel interference problem as the same signal, time delayed with differing amplitude, is sent to both antennas. Space-Time Coding (STC) was developed with the intention of mitigating this co-channel interference problem, also known as the "two antenna problem". Lab testing and preliminary flight testing of developmental and pre-production hardware has been completed and documented. This is the first test dedicated to assessing the performance of a production STC system in a real-world test environment. This paper will briefly describe lab testing that preceded the flight testing, describes the airborne and ground station configurations used during the flight test, and provides detailed results of the performance of the space time coded telemetry link as compared against a reference telemetry link.

ITC/USA 2013 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Ninth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 21-24, 2013 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / Since the waveform was first developed by the Advanced Range Telemetry Program (ARTM) and adopted by the Range Commanders Council Telemetry Group (RCC/TG), receiver/demodulators for the ARTM Continuous Phase Modulation (CPM) waveform have undergone continued development by several hardware vendors to boost performance in terms of phase noise, detection performance, and resynchronization time. These same results were initially presented at the International Telemetry Conference (ITC) 2003 when hardware first became available supporting this waveform, at the time called ARTM Tier II. This paper reexamines the current state of the art performance of ARTM CPM receiver/demodulators available in the marketplace today.

ITC/USA 2014 Conference Proceedings / The Fiftieth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 20-23, 2014 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, CA / In some flight test scenarios the telemetry link is noise limited at long slant ranges or during signal fade events caused by antenna pattern nulls. In these situations, a mitigation technique such as forward error correction (FEC) can add several decibels to the link margin. The particular FEC code discussed in this paper is a variant of a low-density parity check (LDPC) code and is coupled with SOQPSK modulation in the hardware tested. This paper will briefly cover lab testing of the flight-ready hardware then present flight test results comparing a baseline uncoded telemetry link with a LDPC-coded telemetry link. This is the first known test dedicated to this specific FEC code in a real-world test environment with flight profile tailored to assess the viability of an LDPC-coded telemetry link.