International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / Over the last several years, the Data Systems Technology Division (DSTD) at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has developed software tools to generate simulated spacecraft data to support the development, test, and verification of prototype and production of its Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) telemetry data systems. Recently, these data simulation tools have demonstrated their versatility and flexibility in the testing and deployment of several very high performance Level Zero Processing (LZP) systems. Because LZP involves the wide scale reordering of transmitted telemetry data, the data simulation tools were required to create a number of very large and complex simulated data sets to effectively test these high rate systems. These data sets simulated spacecraft with numerous instrument data sources downlinking out-of-sequence and errored data streams. Simulated data streams were encapsulated in Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) packet and NASCOM data formats. The knowledge and expertise gained in the development of the current simulation tools has been used to develop a new generation data simulation tool, known as the Simulated Telemetry Generation (STGEN) package. STGEN is a menu driven software package running on UNIX platforms that can implement dynamic test scenarios with very fast turn around times from the data set design to the data set generation. The error options and locations in the telemetry data stream are fed via simple programs which are in turn script-driven. Scripts are used to manipulate packets, frames, and permit error insertion more easily and quickly. This paper first describes the STGEN software package and its test data design strategies. It then provides an example of STGEN 's first usage in the testing of systems to support EOS-AM spacecraft. Finally, a description of future planned improvements and uses of STGEN are provided.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper describes the PTP EX, a 160 Mbps Telemetry and Command front-end system, which takes advantage of the state-of-the-art in networking and software technology, and the rapid development in PC components and FPGA design. Applications for the PTP EX include High-rate Remote Sensing Ground Stations, Satellite/Payload Integration and Testing, High-rate Bit Error Rate Test (BERT) System and High-rate Digital Recorder/Playback System. The PTP EX Interface Board, the MONARCH-EX PCI High Speed Frame Synchronizer/Telemetry Simulator with Reed-Solomon Encoder/Decoder, is designed with the following key capabilities: · 160 Mbps serial input for CCSDS Frame Processing (Frame Synchronization, Derandomization, CRC, Reed-Solomon decoding, time stamping, quality annotation, filtering, routing, and stripping); · 160 Mbps disk logging of Reed-Solomon corrected CCSDS frames with simultaneous real-time processing of spacecraft engineering data and ancillary payload data; · Onboard CCSDS Telemetry Simulation with 160 Mbps serial output (Sync Pattern, background pattern, ID counter, time stamp, CRC, Reed-Solomon encoding, Randomization, and Convolutional encoding); · Bit Error Rate Testing up to 160 Mbps (Pseudo-random transmitter and receiver with bit error counter). The innovative architecture of the MONARCH-EX allows for simultaneous logging of a high-rate data stream and real-time telemetry processing. The MONARCH-EX is also designed with the latest in field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. FPGAs allow the board to be reprogrammed quickly and easily to perform different functions. Thus, the same hardware can be used for both Telemetry processing and simulation, and BERT applications. The PTP EX also takes advantage of the latest advances in off-the-shelf PC computing and technology, including Windows NT, Pentium II, PCI, Gigabit Ethernet, and RAID subsystems. Avtec Systems, Inc. is leveraging the PTP EX to take advantage of the continuous improvement in high-end PC server components.