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.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / There is growing interest in the airborne instrumentation community to adopt commercial standards to obtain scalable data rates, standards based interoperability, and utilization of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) products to reduce system costs. However, there has been few such data acquisition systems developed to date. L-3 Telemetry East has developed a prototype called the Network Data Acquisition System (NetDAS), which is based on the 10/100 Base-T Ethernet standard, TCP/UDP/IP network protocols and an industrial Ethernet switch. NetDAS has added network capability to the legacy MPC-800 telemetry system by replacing the existing formatter module with a formatter/controller based on a COTS CPU module and a custom designed bridge module. NetDAS has demonstrated transmission bit rates as high as 20 Mbps from a single unit using UDP/IP and an Ethernet switch. The NetDAS system has also demonstrated scalable and distributed architecture.