International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / This paper examines two rules for data acquisition that have advantages for today's Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) systems where: • Data is acquired from physically separate test equipment • Deterministic (IRIG-106 (Ch. 4)) and non-deterministic networks co-exist • Data Acquisition Units (DAUs) from multiple vendors are required • Signal lists and sampling rates change rapidly • A time-coherent sampling strategy (even for smart sensors) is required These rules may aid not only in the selection of the data acquisition equipment but also the definition of the sampling, transmission, storage and analysis strategies.