International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / There is a wave of change coming. It started in the industrial automation community and it is slowly and surely working its way into aerospace, satellite and telemetry applications. It’s called the PC, and its not just for simple quick-look data anymore. Using state-of-the-art commercial hardware and software technologies, PC-based architectures can now be used to perform self contained, reliable and high performance telemetry data acquisition and processing functions – previously the domain of expensive, dedicated front end systems. This paper will discuss many of the key enabling technologies and will provide examples of their use in a truly next generation system architecture based on the Microsoft® Windows NT Operating System and related features.