International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 2001 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The DoD has recently mandated new acquisition, or procurement strategies for the research and development community. The policy includes using Non-Developmental Items (NDI) whenever feasible, as well as avoiding the use of proprietary sources. Such practices lesson time from specification to operation, ease of extensibility and progressive maintainability. In this paper we discuss the NDI and in-house designed test assets developed and implemented for testing the pods. Our time from specification to test was less then one year.