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 / Google Soft Decom and the number of hits will be tenfold over the same search last year. The migration of hardware functionality toward software is relentless. On the telemetry front, Data Bridges that take Pulse Code Modulated (PCM) signals and transform them to ubiquitous network packets make it all too easy. The need for expensive hardware such as the Decommutator (Decom), Frame Synchronizer, Digital Recorder, and Oscillograph Recorder (StripChart) will diminish sharply. Software Decom packages will feel the squeeze too, from homegrown Soft Decom software that is easier to maintain and has no licensing issues. This paper airs the dirty laundry associated with this hardware and software. Latencies and ugly temporal aberration that really plague an analyst. Also discussed is how a few packet/file formats eliminate the need for most of the hardware in a traditional telemetry data processing facility.

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 / The Telemetry Data Center (TDC) at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), New Mexico recently targeted analog best source selectors for replacement along with their associated signal handling equipments. The commercial selectors available offered no better performance, so TDC engineers circulated a "White Paper" on real time correlation based compositing. Within two years a Correlating Source Selector (CSS) was fielded successfully. The CSS’s bridging feature unexpectedly opened the door to a ubiqituous software decommutator (decom) that has catalyzed a complete “make-over” of the entire TDC architecture. Hardware and software interaction in a decom is different with the CSS. While performing its correlation tasks the CSS is able to provide raw data over TCP/IP directly to the end application. The CSS places the data in computer friendly frame aligned form and the decommutation may be performed in software. The converse is similarly simple, a data file maybe transferred to the CSS for commutation into PCM. This white paper describes the morphing of software decommutation into a commodity, integrated into each end device, be it graphics display, Disk or Chart recorder. The result is an interesting consolidation that spawns a new functionally integrated Telemetry Data Center ( iTDC). This integrated Display Decom (iDD) concept has been demonstrated on Apple G5 RISC computers.