International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper describes the design of a PC plug-in card that incorporates all functions of the base band segment of a PCM decommutator which includes the bit synchroniser (BS), frame synchroniser (FS) and subframe synchroniser (SFS). FPGAs are used for the realization of the digital sections of the circuit. The card is capable of handling all standard IRIG codes. The bit synchroniser can handle data rates upto 1Mbps (NRZL), while the frame and subframe synchronisers have been designed to work upto 10 Mbps.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1992 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / The current F/A-18 data reduction/analysis system is incapable of meeting increased customer demands. A new system has been developed and is based on new technologies. In the process of developing the new system, the design team had to divorce themselves from the current system and consider what the ideal system would consist of. This was accomplished with great success in the areas of timeliness of data turn around, customer satisfaction, and increased efficiency.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / November 04-07, 1991 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Telemetry Test Station has been developed at the Digital Systems Division, ISRO Satellite Centre, to test the housekeeping telemetry packages which will be flown onboard satellites. The heart of the test procedure is the decommutation, display and processing of the telemetry output format. The decommutation has been achieved by designing a simple plug in card to an IBM PC/XT compatible computer and writing the related assembly language software. The card and the software have been extensively tested and found to work satisfactorily upto 60 Kbps PCM data rate. To make the hardware and software flexible and truly general purpose, the acquisition should be independent of the modes of operation and data formats. All the parameters which define acquisition display and processing are therefore programmable and can be changed at any time. The parameters which influence acquisition are bit rate, word rate, frame rate, length of word, length of frame and frame synchronous code. The bit rate is transparent, i.e., need not be set by the user. The word length is assumed to be 8 bits or multiples of 8 bits. The other parameters are programmable at any time during the test session. Similarly, the parameters which affect display are the display rate, and positioning of the format including highlighting, alarm signals, related information etc. This gives a user the facility to tailor the display to his liking. The storage is also flexible and independent of display. All these modes are in real time and have therefore been coded in assembly. It has been found that a large part of the software is needed for user interface alone and user requirement is far more changeable than expected. The software is therefore designed for change. The problems and solutions in achieving these features are discussed in this paper.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / This paper discusses the telemetry processing and data verification performed by the SBV Processing, Operations and Control Center (SPOCC) located at MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL). The SPOCC is unique among the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) Data Processing Centers because it supports operational demonstrations of the SBV sensor for Space-Based Space Surveillance applications. The surveillance experiment objectives focus on tracking of resident space objects (RSOs), including acquisition of newly launched satellites. Since Space Surveillance operations have fundamentally short timelines, the SPOCC must be deeply involved in the mission planning for the series of observations and must receive and process the resulting data quickly. In order to achieve these objectives, the MSX Concept of Operations (CONOPS) has been developed to include the SPOCC in the operations planning process. The SPOCC is responsible for generating all MSX spacecraft command information required to execute space surveillance events using the MSX. This operating agreement and a highly automated planning system at the SPOCC allow the planning timeline objectives to be met. In addition, the Space Surveillance experiment scenarios call for active use of the 1 Mbps real-time link to transmit processed targets tracks from the SBV to the SPOCC for processing and for short time-line response of the SPOCC to process the track of the new object and produce new commands for the MSX spacecraft, or other space surveillance sensors, to re-acquire the object. To accomplish this, surveillance data processed and stored onboard the SBV is transmitted to the APL Mission Processing Center via 1 Mbps contacts with the dedicated Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) station, or via one of the AFSCN RTS locations, which forwards the telemetry in real-time to APL. The Mission Processing facility at APL automatically processes the MSX telemetry to extract the SBV allocation and forwards the data via file transfer over a dedicated fractional T1 link to the SPOCC. The data arriving at the SPOCC is automatically identified and processed to yield calibrated metric observations of RSOs. These results are then fed forward into the mission planning process for follow-up observations. In addition to the experiment support discussed above, the SPOCC monitors and stores SBV housekeeping data, monitors payload health and status, and supports diagnosis and correction. There are also software tools which support the assessment of the results of surveillance experiments and to produce a number of products used by the SBV instrument team to assess the overall performance characteristics of the SBV instrument.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 23-26, 2000 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / On reviewing current PCM on-board data acquisition systems design is not very uncommon to find lots of useful signals being generated together with the PCM stream, such as bit clocks, word clocks, minor and major frame pulses. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a conceptual design of a digital recording device that takes advantage of these signals to collect data directly into a computer compatible disk file. Such device can eliminate the need of further PCM signal processing after the test and speed up the conversion process of pure digital sampling values into floating point numbers.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1998 / Town & Country Resort Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / The Space Sensing & Vehicle Control Branch of the Air Force Research Laboratory and Voss Scientific, Albuquerque, NM, are developing an advanced PC and COTS-based satellite telemetry processing, analysis and display system known as the PC-Satellite Telemetry Server (PC-STS). This program grew out of a need to develop less expensive, more capable, more flexible, and expandable solutions to the satellite telemetry analysis requirements of the Air Force. Any new system must employ industry standard, open architecture, network and database protocols allowing for easy growth and migration to new technologies, as they become available. Thus, the PC-STS will run on standard personal computers and the Windows NT operating system. The focus of this work and this paper is the Telemetry Server component, and in particular, the custom-built decommutation board. The decommution board will be capable of processing frame formatted and CCSDS packet telemetry. It will be capable of fully decommutating telemetry data, converting raw data to engineering units, and providing this data to the Telemetry Server host. Time tagged engineering units or minor frames of telemetry will be transmitted to the Telemetry Server processor via on-board memory buffers. The decom board uses the PCI bus, programmable DSPs, considerable on-board memory, and a SCSI bus for local archiving. This paper presents the general architecture of the PC-STS, and discusses specific design considerations. These include trade-offs made during the design of the board’s hardware and software, operational specifications, and graphical user interfaces to program, monitor, and control the board.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1988 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / With more complex vehicle designs, the frequency and number of measurements contained in telemetry data streams has dramatically increased. One way of improving the use of bandwidth is to change the sample rate, quantity, or type of measurements dynamically. A telemetry front end must be programmable to handle different formats. In a front end that decommutates and routes measurements, a decom list is a control program, which defines the location, size, orientation, and identity of the measurements. To deal with dynamic format changes, a telemetry front end must be able to switch between decom lists. A practical approach to decom list switching must address the needs of error avoidance, packet switching, and the location of switching keys in any portion of the format. Switching between formats should not be restricted to a preprogrammed sequence, but should allow multiple destinations from a particular decom list. A practical and flexible implementation of decom list switching is detailed along with an explanation of how this implementation solves a variety of decommutation problems.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1994 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / The advantages of using visual programming to create, modify, test and display a telemetry stream are presented. The failure to fully deploy the high-gain antenna of the Galileo spacecraft has resulted in a software redesign of the computer systems onboard the spacecraft to support the low-gain antenna mission. Visual programming software is being used to test new algorithms as part of the ground support for the spacecraft Test Bed. It is very important that any new software algorithms be thoroughly tested on the ground before any modifications are made to the spacecraft. The advantage of using a visual programming language (LabVIEW, National Instruments) is that it provides easy visibility into the decommutation process that is being modified by the Galileo programming support team. In addition, utilities were written using visual programming to allow real-time data display and error detection. A data acquisition board is used to clock in the actual synchronous telemetry signal from the Test Bed at rates below 10 kHz. The time to write and modify the code using visual programming is significantly less (by a factor of 4 to 10) than using text-based code. The gains in productivity are attributed to the communication among the customer, developer, and computer that are facilitated by the visual syntax of the language.

The Test and Training Enabling Architecture (TENA) is implemented within the TENA Software Decommutation System (TSDS) in order to bring TENA as close as possible to the sensor interface. Key attributes of TSDS include: • TSDS is a software-based approach to telemetry stream decommutation implemented within Java. This offers technical advantages such as platform independence and portability. • TSDS uses auto code generation technologies to further reduce the effort associated with updating decommutation systems to support new telemetry stream definitions. Users of TSDS within the range are not required to have detailed knowledge of proprietary protocols, nor are they required to have an understanding of how to implement decommutation within software. The use of code generation in software decommutation offers potential cost savings throughout the entire T&E community. • TSDA offers a native TENA interface so that telemetry data can be published directly into TENA object models.

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 Telemetry Data Center (TDC) at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), New Mexico recently targeted analog best source selectors for replacement along with their associated signal handling equipments. The commercial selectors available offered no better performance, so TDC engineers circulated a "White Paper" on real time correlation based compositing. Within two years a Correlating Source Selector (CSS) was fielded successfully. The CSS’s bridging feature unexpectedly opened the door to a ubiqituous software decommutator (decom) that has catalyzed a complete “make-over” of the entire TDC architecture. Hardware and software interaction in a decom is different with the CSS. While performing its correlation tasks the CSS is able to provide raw data over TCP/IP directly to the end application. The CSS places the data in computer friendly frame aligned form and the decommutation may be performed in software. The converse is similarly simple, a data file maybe transferred to the CSS for commutation into PCM. This white paper describes the morphing of software decommutation into a commodity, integrated into each end device, be it graphics display, Disk or Chart recorder. The result is an interesting consolidation that spawns a new functionally integrated Telemetry Data Center ( iTDC). This integrated Display Decom (iDD) concept has been demonstrated on Apple G5 RISC computers.