International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Visions of future airborne data acquisition systems include the “network in the sky” concept where a test or training participant logs on to the range network, just like today's computer users on the ground log onto the local area network (LAN). Through two-way telemetry links, the test or training participant seamlessly becomes a node in the range network. Thus, easily sharing data with event controllers and other airborne, ship-, ground-, and space-based network nodes. Such a network would allow the conduct of highly integrated test/training scenarios involving virtual and real participants without requiring physical proximity. This technology has a high payoff for the warfighter, making it a desirable objective of present and future DoD-funded development of data acquisition systems. This much-anticipated, future state-of-the-art in data acquisition will require extensive changes from today's test/training instrumentation architecture. Based on technology that is currently emerging for computer networks, this paper describes an evolutionary path for data acquisition systems to follow in order to achieve the anticipated bandwidth required for future bandwidth-intensive applications like the network in the sky. New networking paradigms, like Sun's Jini™ project, point the way to impressive usability with dramatically lower costs and network administration in the near term for ground-based networks, but they require support for just-in-time delivery of software “drivers” and other applications. These need gigabit network speeds to be viable. If this and other new networking technology is to be transferred to the test/training domain, bit rates will require two orders of magnitude improvement from today's 10-megabit range. This paper explores the technological and political telemetry issues that must be addressed before there can be a network in the sky (or anywhere else).

ITC/USA 2015 Conference Proceedings / The Fifty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2015 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / Telemetry data from flight tests are normally plotted using MatLab™ or other third party software. For most of the trajectory and flight parameters, a static 2D or 3D line graph does not provide the proper data visualization that can be accomplished with 3D software. Commercial 3D software can be expensive and difficult to customize, and writing custom software using Direct3D or OpenGL can be complex and time consuming. These problems were overcome using C# and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) to quickly and easily create a 3D Telemetry Theater and Trajectory Visualization Tool to dynamically display actual and simulated flight tests.

ITC/USA 2015 Conference Proceedings / The Fifty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2015 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / A new advanced 2.4 meter telemetry tracking antenna system allows for successful autotracking of high dynamic targets. The system is designed to work at C, S, and L bands. One of these systems at L/S-band was recently implemented and tested in the field. The testing included tracking aircraft during maneuvers such as rolls, spins, and antenna tower fly-by at high rates of speed. This paper examines test results and some of the features of the new system that allow for continuous tracking.

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper is about the installation of the instrumentation system and the strain gages on an E-2C Hawkeye for the Advanced Hawkeye Loads Risk Reduction project. Background information on why this project came about will be given. Explanations on why the existing instrumentation system was modified to the current system will be presented. Anthony Cullison (co-author of this paper) will explain the installation of the strain gages.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / Recent changes in spectrum availability as well as higher demands for spectrum have motivated the development of telemetry transmit systems capable of fully operating over both L and S telemetry bands. However, enabling operation within these two bands poses new problems in system design. This paper presents a prototype system capable of operating between 1.4 and 2.4 GHz, which supports continuous phase modulation (CPM) waveforms such as pulse code modulation (PCM), frequency modulation (FM), and shaped offset quadrature phase shift keying (SOQPSK). The system architecture is detailed, and the prototype performance is discussed.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / The production of flight test plans have received attention from many research workers due to increasing complexity of testing facilities, the complex demands proposed by customers and the large volume of data required from test flights. The paper opens with a review of research work conducted by other authors who have contributed to ameliorating the preparation of flight test plans and processing the resulting data. This is followed by a description of a specific problem area; efficiently configuring the flight test data telemetry format (defined by the relevant standards while meeting user requirements of sampling rate and PCM word length). Following a description of a current semi-automated system, the authors propose an enhanced approach and demonstrate its efficiency through two case studies.

The University of Tennessee Space Institute’s (UTSI) active airborne science program often requires extensive modification to its fleet of aircraft in order to meet mission and customer requirements. These modifications can alter the flight characteristics of the aircraft. In order to determine if the aircraft is safe to fly after modification and to find any new flight characteristics resulting from the modifications, the flight test engineer (FTE) must plan and conduct limited flight testing on the aircraft and evaluate the resulting data to ensure safety of flight. The more efficient the data reduction and analysis process the quicker the aircraft can be released to the customer for flight operations. Flight-Data Analysis and RePorting System (F-DARPS) was developed in an attempt to decrease the time spent reducing data by automating the entire data reduction process. F-DARPS searches through a data file, determines when the aircraft is in a trim state, processes the data, and presents a limited number of performance and stability and control (S&C) parameters to the FTE in a meaningful manner. Because F-DARPS is in an early stage of development, the system requirements, architecture, code techniques, and a self case study with future revision recommendations will be discussed in detail.

The last key to implementing laminar flow control on swept-wings is controlling the crossflow instability. One promising technology is spanwise-periodic discrete roughness elements (DREs). Previous work has shown success with applique DREs and extending the region of laminar flow. This work seeks to extend the DRE technology to include dielectric barrier discharge plasma actuators as well as recreate past experiments with applique DREs. One major need in implementing DREs and controlling crossflow is attaining an accurate measurement of the freestream atmospheric turbulence intensities. Knowing the atmospheric turbulence intensity will allow for comparing wind tunnel experiments to the flight environment and help produce better wind tunnel experiments by allowing them to better match the flight environment. Also, knowledge of the turbulence intensity at the specific instance of an experimental data point will allow for determining if differences in experimental results are the result of a difference in turbulence intensity. It has been determined through this work that the levels of freestream turbulence range from 0.023% - 0.047% with an average of 0.035%. These levels were reached through the use of temporal correlations to remove electronic noise as well as acoustic sound from the hotwire measurements and hence are lower than previously calculated.

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 / Images frames have always been used as information source for the Flight Test Campaigns (FTC). During the flight tests, the images displayed on the Head-Up Display (HUD) could be stored for later analysis. HUD images presents aircraft data provided by its avionics system. For a simplified Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI), where data accuracy is not a big issue, HUD images could become the primary information source. However in this case data analysis is executed manually, frame by frame for information extraction (e.g. Aircraft position parameters: Latitude; Longitude and Altitude). In approximately one hour of flight test about 36,000 frames are generated using standard-definition television format, therefore data extraction becomes complex, time consuming and prone to failures. To improve efficiency and effectiveness for this FTC, the Instituto de Pesquisas e Ensaios em Voo (IPEV - Flight Test and Research Institute) with Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA - Aeronautical Technology Institute) developed an image processing application with pattern recognition using the correlation process to extract information from different positions on the images of the HUD. Preliminary test and evaluation carried out by 2012 using HUD images of the jet fighter EMBRAER A1. The test results demonstrate satisfactory performance for this tool.

The United States Air Force has specified a need for the next generation, High Altitude, Long Endurance aircraft capable of carrying advanced sensor arrays over very large distances and at extreme altitudes. These extensive set of requirements has required a radical shift away from the conventional wing & tube configurations with a new focus placed on extremely light weight and unconventional structural and aerodynamic configurations. One such example is the Boeing Joined wing SensorCraft Concept. The Joined wing concept has potential structural and sensor carrying benefits, but along with these potential benefits come several challenges. One of the primary concerns is the aeroelastic response of the aft wing, with potential adverse behaviours such as flutter and highly nonlinear structural behaviour of the aft wing under gust conditions. While nonlinear computation models have been developed to predict these responses, there exists a lack of experimental ground and flight test data for this unique joined wing configuration with which to benchmark the analytical predictions. The goal of this work is to develop a 5m, scaled version of the Boeing Joined Wing configuration and collect data, through a series of ground and flight based tests, which will allow designers to better understand the unique structural response of the configuration. A computational framework was developed that is capable of linearly scaling the aeroelastic response of the full scale aircraft and optimize a reduced scale aircraft to exhibit equivalent scaled behaviour. A series of reduced complexity models was developed to further investigate the flying characteristics of the configuration, test avionics and instrumentation systems and the develop flight control laws to adequately control the marginally stable aircraft. Lessons learned were then applied the 5m flight test article that was designed and constructed by the author. In the final stage of the project, the decision was made to relax the aeroelastically scaled constraint in order to allow additional softening of the structure to further investigate the nonlinear behaviour of the aircraft. Due to the added risk and complexity of flying this highly flexible aircraft the decision was made to produce the final aeroelastically scaled article at the 1.85m scale. This model was designed, developed and ground tested in the lead up to a follow on project which will see additional flight testing performed in conjunction with Boeing Inc. / Graduate