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 / Today Ranges are faced with the typical dilemma of doing more with less—less money, less time, and less experienced range personnel. Meanwhile, Ranges are being forced to make their operations more efficient in use of time, money, and functionality. As a result, Ranges are looking for automated ways to remotely configure and operate their tracking stations and to provide interoperability between ranges, sites, and equipment. RT Logic worked with numerous range operators and equipment vendors to create an open software architecture that provides rapid device configuration, equipment status at a glance, and automatic fault detection and isolation. RT Logic’s architecture utilizes the CORBA specification to achieve extensibility and scalability for future range requirements. Adoption of this architecture and approach will reduce costs, time, and mistakes.

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 / The size of the range at White Sands means multiple acquisition sites are needed to properly cover a typical vehicle trajectory. As vehicle complexity increase, the need for robust acquisition grows. Multiple acquisition sites are needed to provide as complete coverage as practical. Space Diversity combining would provide a single composite source for all the displays and recording, but this is not practical due to the large distances between acquisition sites. Instead a composite is made from the various sites by correlation on non-encrypted (or decrypted) data. The previous best source selector, a frame synch histogrammer, could produce encrypted and decrypted composites. Some of our customers have missed the encrypted composites, hence the subject is revisited to encourage development. This paper reviews post decryption correlation and then focuses on correlating on encrypted data. The encryption serves to eliminate the ambiguities that are inherent in decrypted (nonencrypted) signals. So, it may be possible to accomplish this with a small correlator. The expected performance would be similar to that of correlated composites on decrypted or unencrypted data. The typical configuration would be considerably smaller as well since only two decrypters would be needed. One decrypter alone would be insufficient and could not resolve the case where only one site has data and the remaining sites have noise. When there is no correlation the correct site cannot be resolved. Testing these compositing methods is also discussed, as a good test method also provides insight on how the compositor should work.

ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / In pursuit to understanding the flight behavior and characterizing the stability of a flarestabilized projectile, an experiment was conducted to assess the robustness of an inertial sensor suite the size of a dime (17.5mm) by integrating to a telemetry system for recording. The system had to survive launch acceleration exceeding 25,000G’s. This is the beginning of an effort to reduce the size of telemetry systems and diagnostic devices for use in medium caliber munitions and smaller. A description of the telemetry system and subsystem will be presented along with the results.

ITC/USA 2010 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Sixth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 25-28, 2010 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / This paper will discuss the design of a new antenna element for use on vehicles requiring a thin conformal antenna such as on missiles or targets. The new element employs a partial shorted edge, which reduces the size of the element compared to a traditional microwave patch, while maintaining the impedance bandwidth.

ITC/USA 2010 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Sixth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 25-28, 2010 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / The direction of future data acquisition systems is rapidly moving toward a network-based architecture. There is a handful of these network-based flight test systems already operating, and the current trend is catching on all over the flight test community. As vendors are churning out a whole new product line for networking capabilities, system engineers are left asking, "What do I do with all of this non-networked, legacy equipment?" Before overhauling an entire test system, one should look for a way to incorporate the legacy system components into the modern network architecture. Finding a way to integrate the two generations of systems can provide substantial savings in both cost and application development time. This paper discusses the advantages of integrating legacy equipment into a network-based architecture with examples from systems where this approach was utilized.

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 terrestrial microwave telemetry links show limitation due their inherent features concerning bandwidth availability, frequency allocation and range. Also it supports only one aircraft per test and the data acquisition capacity can be enhanced. Following the flight tests trends, it proposes a telemetry link based on satellite communications deployed by off the shelf equipments allowing advantages as bandwidth availability, multiple aircrafts telemetry and almost global range into the reliability standards. By simple equations and typical flight tests data it demonstrates the feasibility of the telemetry system proposed for time and costs reduction to optimize flight tests programs.

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 / Creating a generic, multi-vendor data exchange system for transmitting telemetry configurations between various systems is a daunting task. To date many different systems have been proposed including relational databases (RDBMS), TMATS, and several different XML schemas. Although many of these systems have been implemented, a complete, flexible solution has not been developed. This paper describes an implementation that is currently in use for exporting and importing a complete telemetry system via XML. Using this system, an engineer can import an entire telemetry configuration, a partial telemetry configuration, or even just a single measurement (parameter). As a result, the gap between user database systems and the airborne instrumentation vendor’s configuration software (IVCS) is seamlessly bridged. This provides many benefits including: the ability to rapidly change configurations, data entry error avoidance, version control, the protection of sensitive information, and configuration reusability. This system allows for the configuration of all aspects of the telemetry setup including data acquisition hardware, transmitters, ground stations, and recorders. In addition, the recorder settings and the definition of the data that are to be recorded are coupled and linked to the rest of the telemetry configuration, which facilitates future data recovery.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 18-21, 2004 / Town & Country Resort, San Diego, California / Because all video compression schemes introduce artifacts into the compressed video images, degradation occurs. These artifacts, generated by a wavelet-based compression scheme, will vary with the compression ratio and input imagery, but do show some consistent patterns across applications. There are a number of design trade-offs that can be made to mitigate the effect of these artifacts. By understanding the artifacts introduced by video compression and being able to anticipate the amount of image degradation, the video compression can be configured in a manner optimal to the application under consideration in telemetry.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The United States Government, through the Integrated Program Office (IPO), currently operates a converged polar orbiting constellation of POES and DMSP satellites to acquire, process and disseminate meteorological and environmental data on a global scale. Because of the increasing need for more precise and timely meteorological data, the IPO is developing the follow on system known as the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). The NPOESS system is expected to use a modernized, CCSDS compatible data acquisition and distribution network, and will provide more timely data than for the current POES/DMSP satellites. The NPOESS satellite system will also continue the collection of long-term environmental data as a follow on to NASA’s Earth Observation System (EOS). The continuation of NASA’s EOS system will begin with a risk reduction effort in support of NPOESS, known as the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP). This paper will describe the CCSDS implementation that both the NPP and NPOESS satellites are expected to use beginning with the launch of the NPP spacecraft in 2006. The launch of the first NPOESS satellite is anticipated in 2009.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / The use of two antennas on an aeronautical telemetry transmitter is a common practice for overcoming signal obstruction that can occur during air vehicle maneuvering. However, this practice also leads to interference nulls that can cause dramatic degradation in the average signal integrity. This paper discusses the application of a transmit diversity scheme capable of overcoming this interference problem. The development leads to symbol error probability expressions that can be applied to assess the performance of the scheme relative to that of traditional schemes. Representative computational examples demonstrate the potential of the method.