International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1993 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Desktop Processors (IBM PC, PC-compatible, and Macintosh) have made a major impact on how the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD}, Patuxent River engineering community performs their work in aircraft weapons tests. The personal processors are utilized by the flight-test engineers not only for report preparation, but also for post-flight Engineering Unit (EU) data reduction and analysis. Present day requirements direct a need for improved post-flight data handling than those of the past. These requirements are driven by the need to analyze all the vehicle's parameters prior to the succeeding test flight, and to generate test reports in a more cost effective and timely manner. This paper defines the post-flight data distribution system at NAWCAD, Patuxent River, explains how these tasks were handled in the past, and the development of a real-time data storage designed approach for post-flight data handling. This engineering design is then described explaining how it sets the precedence for NAWCAD, Patuxent River's future plans; and how it provides the flight-test engineer with the test vehicle's EU data immediately available post-flight at his desktop processor.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1994 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / With today's telemetry systems, an hour-long analog test tape can be digitized in one hour or less. However, the digitized data produced by today's telemetry systems is usually not in a format that can be directly analyzed by the test engineer's analysis tools. The digitized data must be formatted before analysis can begin. The data formatting process can take from one to eight hours depending on the amount of data, the power of the system's host computer, and the complexity of the analysis software's data format. If more than one analysis package is used by the test engineer, the data has to be formatted separately for each package. Using today's high-speed RISC processors and large memory technology, a real-time Flexible Data Formatter can be added to the Telemetry Front End to perform this formatting function. The Flexible Data Formatter (FDF) allows the telemetry user to program the front-end hardware to output the telemetry test data in a format compatible with the user's analysis software. The FDF can also output multiple data files, each in a different format for supporting multiple analysis packages. This eliminates the file formatting step, thus reducing the time to process the data from each test by a factor of two to nine.