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 / Instrumentation recorders have evolved continuously over the years. Their growth has primarily been driven by technology advancements. The latest recording equipment generally utilizes hard disk, disk array, or solid-state storage technology, which results in greater capacity and performance. Most recorders integrate storage media with multiplexer electronics resulting in a highly efficient yet inflexible and physically large recording system. This paper describes an instrumentation multiplexer/recorder system using an open architecture between the multiplexer and the storage media that allows insertion of conventional recording technologies. This approach provides a generalized solution with enough flexibility and scalability to address the majority of instrumentation recording needs. This system is based on the latest IRIG-106 chapter 10 standard, thus supporting interoperability throughout the flight test community.

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 / Wideband data acquisition units have been used as part of an instrumentation system for several decades. Historically, these units operated asynchronously from each other, and from the rest of the instrumentation system when installed on the same test vehicle. When many wideband units are required to slave their formats or sampling rate to the test vehicle’s event of interest such as external computer event clock, radar, or laser pulse train; few solutions were available. Additionally, a single test vehicle may use ten to thirty wideband units operating at up to 20 Mbps each. Such systems present a challenge to the instrumentation engineers to synchronize, transmit safety of flight information, and record. This paper will examine a distributed wideband data acquisition system in which each acquisition unit operates under its own data rate and format, yet remains fully synchronized to an external fixed or variable simultaneous sampling rate to provide total system coherency. The system aggregate rate can be as low as a few Mbps to as high as 1 Gbps. Data acquired from the acquisition units is further multiplexed per IRIG-106 chapter 10 using distributed data multiplexers for recording.

ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Sixteen years ago, RCC added Chapter 8 to the IRIG-106 standard for the acquisition of 100% MIL-STD-1553 data from up to eight buses for recording and/or transmission. In the past 5 years, the RCC recording committee added Chapter 10 to the IRIG-106 standard for acquisition of 100% data from PCM, MIL-STD-1553 busses, Video, ARINC-429, Ethernet, IEEE-1394, and others. IRIG-106 Chapter 10 recorder suppliers have further developed customer-specific interfaces to meet additional customer needs. These needs have included unique radar and avionic bus interfaces such as F-16 Fibre Channel, F-35 Fibre Channel, F-22 FOTR, and others. IRIG-106 Chapter 8 and Chapter 10 have provided major challenges to the user community when the acquired avionics bus data included data that must be filtered and never leave the test platform via TM or recording media. The preferred method of filtering data to ensure that it is never recorded or transmitted is to do so at the interface level with the avionic busses. This paper describes the data filtering used on the F-22 Program for the MIL-STD-1553 buses and the FOTR bus as part of the IRIG-106 Chapter 10 Multiplexer/Recorder System. This filtering method blocks selected data at the interface level prior to being transferred over the system bus to the media(s). Additionally, the paper describes the configuration method for defining the data to be blocked and the report generated in order to allow for a second party to verify proper programming of the system.

ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Modern aircraft now employ widely accepted and standardized technology commonly found in COTS applications. One such technology, Fibre Channel, has been deployed to transport both low and high-speed measurement data. Data as varied as “command and control”, “Radar Sensors” and “video” are being transmitted over fibre channel on many aircrafts. Some of these applications require data monitoring in listening mode only where transmission from the instrumentation equipment is not allowed or possible. As a result, standard off the shelf Fibre Channel devices cannot be used, and a development of a general purpose Fibre Channel monitor/ analyzer device and product is required. This paper discusses the concept, merits, and implementation of fibre channel bus monitoring in modern data acquisition systems. Techniques for tapping into an optical fibre channel network, as well as, a recording format for IRIG106 Chapter 10 are included. An overview of fibre channel topologies and protocols is also provided.

ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / For the final evaluation of a GPS attitude determination algorithm, it was determined its true performance in terms of its accuracy, reliability and dynamic response. To accomplish that, a flight test campaign was carried out to validate the attitude determination algorithm. In this phase, the measured aircraft attitude was compared to a reference attitude, to allow the determination of the errors. The system was built using non-dedicated THALES Z-FX airborne GPS receivers and a complete Flight Tests Instrumentation (FTI) System. Each GPS receiver operates synchronized with its internal time base. The FTI measurements are synchronized to an IRIG-B time base. All time bases have their own random walk characteristic. To avoid C/A code ambiguity, when its internal time base approaches ±1ms error from the GPS time, its clock is then corrected causing time and phase observables discontinuities. A multiple time base synchronization process was developed to correlate GPS and FTI data. The results are presented and the residual errors were considered acceptable. These data allowed the determination of the performance and accuracy of the GPS attitude determination algorithm. The tests profiles are fully compliant with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Advisory Circular (AC) 25-7A.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1992 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / Video tape is becoming more and more popular for storing and analyzing missions. Video tape is inexpensive, it can hold a two hour test, and it can be edited and manipulated by easily available consumer electronics equipment. Standard technology allows each frame to be time stamped with SMPTE code, so that any point in the mission can be displayed on a CRT. To further correlate data from multiple acquisition systems, the SMPTE code can be derived from IRIG using commercially available code converters. Unfortunately, acquiring and storing analog data has not been so easy. Typically, analog signals from various sensors are coded, transmitted, decoded and sent to a chart recorder. Since chart recorders cannot normally store an entire mission internally, or time stamp each data value, it is very difficult for an analyst to accurately correlate analog data to an individual video frame. Normally the only method is to note the time stamp on the video frame and unroll the chart to the appropriate second or minute, depending on the code used, noted in the margin, and estimate the frame location as a percentage of the time code period. This is very inconvenient if the telemetrist is trying to establish an on-line data retreival system. To make matters worse, the methods of presentation are very different, chart paper as opposed to a CRT, and require the analyst to shift focus constantly. For these reasons, many telemetry stations do not currently have a workable plan to integrate analog and video subsystems even though it is now generally agreed that such integration is ultimately desirable.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / In recent years we have seen an increase in the use of MIL-STD-1553 buses and other asynchronous data sources used in new missile and launcher designs. The application of multiplexed asynchronous buses in missiles and launchers is very common today. With increasing application of asynchronous data sources into very complex systems the need to acquire, analyze, and present one hundred percent of the bus traffic in real time or near real time has become especially important during testing and diagnostic operations. This paper discusses ways of converting asynchronous data, including MIL-STD-1553, into a telemetry format that is suitable for encryption, telemetering, recording, and presenting with Inter Range Instrumentation Group (IRIG) compatible off-the-shelf hardware. The importance of these designs is to provide the capability to conserve data bandwidth and to maximize the use of existing hardware. In addition, this paper will discuss a unique decode and time tagging design that conserves data storage when compared to the methods in IRIG Standard 106-96 and still maintains a very accurate time tag.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / An IRIG standard flight recorder has been developed that is based on half-inch helical scan technology. The recorder was developed by combining the data channel of existing ground-based recording systems with transport technology used in both flight test and operational fighter aircraft environments. The design goal was to achieve cross play compatibility with the defined IRIG 106.6 tape format. Significant margins were provided in the design to maintain compatibility with tapes recorded in fighter aircraft environments. Operation at up to 50,000 feet, a temperature range of -40EC to +55EC, and vibration sources to Mil Spec 5400T are requirements in this environment. How these technical problems were overcome during the development of this recorder is addressed in this paper.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / As the number of telemetry applications at sites increases, the need for a higher bandwidth link from site-to-site grows. The use of an inverse T1 multiplexer allows the site to utilize multiple T1 lines rather than more costly higher bandwidth lines. There are many advantages to using a recognized packet standard, such as IRIG-107/98, over simply routing the streams through T1 lines. One advantage is that there is a total separation of data stream clock from T1 transmission clock, reducing synchronization circuitry and overhead. Another advantage is that the use of packets also allows for a smooth reconstructed clock phase on the receiving site, creating a virtually seamless transmission of clock and data. And, finally, by using a recognized packet standard, the inverse T1 multiplexer may easily be integrated into ranging and telemetry systems already incorporating packetized telemetry. This paper will discuss the combination of packets and inverse multiplexing to achieve an expandable transmission system capable of delivering a high bandwidth data stream across multiple T1 lines.

ITC/USA 2013 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Ninth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 21-24, 2013 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / Since both airborne and ground applications are able to handle and process IRIG 106, Chapter 10 standard data (further referred to as C10) from files or from live streaming UDP network data, it is a logical extension of the standard to telemeter network data from the air to the ground support systems with little or no modification. This paper describes a method to transport C10 compliant packets over a Class II, telemetry stream (C10 TMDL) which is fully compatible with existing encryptors, transmitters, receivers, and decryptors.