International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Recent years have seen a sharp rise in the size of satellite constellations. The monitoring and analysis tools in use today, however, were developed for smaller constellations and are ill-equipped to handle the increased volume of telemetry data. A new technology that can accommodate vast quantities of data is 3-D visualization. Data is abstracted to show the degree to which it deviates from normal, allowing an analyst to absorb the status of thousands of parameters in a single glance. Trend alarms notify the user of dangerous trends before data exceeds normal limits. Used appropriately, 3-D visualization can extend the life of a satellite by ten to twenty percent.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Telemetry format descriptions and engineering unit conversion calibrations are generated in an assortment of formats and numbering systems on various media. Usually this information comes to the central telemetry receiving/processing system from multiple sources, fragmented and disjointed. As present day flight tests require more and more telemetry parameters to be instrumented and processed, standardization and automation for handling this ever increasing amount of information becomes more and more critical. In response to this need, the Telemetry Definition and Processing (TDAP) system has been developed by the Air Force Development Test Center (AFDTC) Eglin AFB, Florida. TDAP standardizes the format of information required to convert PCM data and MIL-STD-1553 Bus data into engineering units. This includes both the format of the data files and the software necessary to display, output, and extract subsets of data. These standardized files are electronically available for TDAP users to review/update and are then used to automatically set up telemetry acquisition systems. This paper describes how TDAP is used to standardize the development and operational test community’s telemetry data reduction process, both real-time and post-test.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 13-16, 1986 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Boeing Commercial Airplane Company presently uses an Airborne Data Analysis and Monitor System (ADAMS) to support extensive qualification testing on new and modified commercial aircraft. The ADAMS system consists of subsystems controlled by independent processors which preprocess serial PCM data, perform application-specific processing, provide graphic display of data, and manage mass storage resources. Setup and control information is passed between processors using the Ethernet protocol on a fiber optic network. Tagged data is passed between processors using a data bus with networking characteristics. During qualification tests, data are dynamically selected, analyses performed, and results recorded. Decisions to proceed or repeat tests are made in real time on the aircraft. Instrumentation in present aircraft includes up to 3700 sensors, with projections for 5750 sensors in the next generation. Concurrently, data throughput rates are increasing, and data preprocessing requirements are becoming more complex. Fairchild Weston Systems, Inc., under contract to Boeing, has developed an Acquisition Interface Assembly (AIA) which accepts multiple streams of PCM data, controls recording and playback on analog tape, performs high speed data preprocessing, and distributes the data to the other ADAMS subsystems. The AIA processes one to three streams in any of the standard IRIG PCM formats using programmable bit, frame and subframe synchronizers. Data from ARINC buses with embedded measurement labels, bus ID’s, and time tags may also be processed by the AIA. Preprocessing is accomplished by two high-performance Distributed Processing Units (DPU) operating in either pipeline or parallel environments. The DPU’s perform concatenation functions, number system conversions, engineering unit conversions, and data tagging for distribution to the ADAMS system. Time information, from either a time code generator or tape playback, may be merged with data with a 0.1 msec resolution. Control and status functions are coordinated by an embedded processor, and are accessible to other ADAMS processors via both the Ethernet interface and a local operator’s terminal. Because the AIA assembly is used in aircraft, the entire functional capability has been packaged in a 14-inch high, rack-mountable chassis with EMI shielding. The unit has been designed for high temperature, high altitude, vibrating environments. The AIA will be a key element in aircraft qualification testing at Boeing well into the next generation of airframes, and specification, design, development, and implementation of the AIA has been carried out with the significance of that fact in mind.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1988 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / The growing complexity of missle, aircraft, and space vehicle systems, along with the advent of fly-by-wire and ultra-high performance unstable airframe technology has created an exploding demand for real time processing power. Recent VLSI developements have allowed addressing these needs in the design of a multi-processor subsystem supplying 10 MIPS and 5 MFLOPS per processor. To provide up to 70 MIPS a Digital Signal Processing subsystem may be configured with up to 7 Processors. Multiple subsystems may be employed in a data processing system to give the user virtually unlimited processing power. Within the DSP module, communication between cards is over a high speed, arbitrated Private Data bus. This prevents the saturation of the system bus with intermediate results, and allows a multiple processor configuration to make full use of each processor. Design goals for a single processor included executing number system conversions, data compression algorithms and 1st order polynomials in under 2 microseconds, and 5th order polynomials in under 4 microseconds. The processor design meets or exceeds all of these goals. Recently upgraded VLSI is available, and makes possible a performance enhancement to 11 MIPS and 9 MFLOPS per processor with reduced power consumption. Design tradeoffs and example applications are presented.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper proposes a telemetering method consisting of delayed frame time diversity (DFTD) as the inner code and Reed-Solomon (RS) code as the outer code. DFTD is used to transmit a real-time frame together with a time-delayed frame which was saved in the memory during a defined period. The RS code is serially concatenated with DFTD. This method was applied to the design of telemetry units that have been used for over ten flight tests. The data results of the flight test for four cases with no applied code, with DFTD only, with the RS code only, and with both DFTD and the RS code are used to compare the number of error frames. The results also show that the proposed method is very useful and applicable to telemetry applications in a communication environment with a deep fade.

ITC/USA 2006 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Second Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 23-26, 2006 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / The software decommutator was recently fielded at White Sands to address the requirements of a new missile test program. This software decommutator is rewritten as a simple C program Function or Class with a simple interface. The function and an Interface Control Definition (ICD) comprise the SoftDecom Engine (SDE). This paper addresses how an SDE can deliver Enterprise Wide Portability, not only that of the SDE, but more importantly a test program!s Verification & Validation (V&V). The crux of the portability issue is reduced to defining the interface of the SDE. In the simplest manifestation only two interfaces are needed and one is a given. The input structure is defined by the telemeter minor frame with time appended if desired. The output structure is no more than an array containing the parameters required. The ICD could be generalized into a standard for most applications, but that isn!t necessary, as the structures are simple, hence easy to adapt to anyway. This new paradigm!s importance will flourish on industries irreversible migration to faster and more complex telemeters. The paper reviews the relative ease that software exhibits when addressing very complex telemeters. With confidence it may be said “ if the telemeter format can be described in writing, it can be processed real time”. Also discussed are tasks that normally require specialized or customized and expensive equipment for example, merged streams, complex simulations and recording and reproducing PCM (sans recorder). Hopefully, your creativity will be engaged as ours has been.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The cost of telemetry collection is significantly reduced by unmanned store and forward systems made possible using 622MHz OC-12 networks. Networks are readily available to telemetry system architects. The in-band control of remote unmanned collection platforms is handled through a Java browser interface. Data from many telemetry channels are collected and temporarily stored on a digital disk system designed around the OC-12 network. The I/O, storage, and network components are configured, set, and initialized remotely. Recordings are started and stopped on command and can be made round-the-clock. Files of stored, time stamped data are delivered at the rate of OC-12 to a distribution center.

Modern bottom-hole assemblies are equipped with various sensors which measure the geological and directional information of the borehole while drilling. It is very crucial to get the measured downhole information to the surface in real time in order to be able to monitor, steer and optimize the drilling process while drilling. The transmission of the information to the surface is most commonly carried out by coded pressure pulses (the technology called mud pulse telemetry) which propagate through the drilling mud inside the drill string towards the surface. However, hardly any specific experimental research on the hydraulic data transmission can be found in the literature. Moreover, it is essential to use a reliable model/simulation tool which can more accurately simulate the pressure pulse propagation in fluids inside drill strings under various drilling operation conditions in order to improve the performance of the data transmission process. The aims of this study are to develop and test a laboratory experimental setup, a simulation model and a novel method for detecting and decoding of measurement while drilling pressure pulse propagation in fluids inside drill strings. This thesis presents a laboratory experimental setup for investigating the process of data transmission in boreholes by mud pulse telemetry. The test facility includes a flow loop, a centrifugal pump, a positive mud pulser or alternatively a mud siren, pressure transducers at four different locations along the flow loop and a data collection system. Moreover, it includes an “actuator system” for the simulation of typical noise patterns created by the common duplex or triplex mud pumps. This laboratory setup with great capabilities opens the way for testing and developing new concepts for data transmission. A theoretical model using ANSYS CFX11 (Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) commercial code) was successfully developed to simulate dynamic pressure pulse transmission behavior in the fluid inside the flow loop. The collected laboratory data which simulate various data transmission processes in boreholes were used to verify and calibrate the theoretical method. A pretty good agreement is achieved between the predicted and measured pressure pulses at different locations along the flow loop for positive pulses with various durations using different flow rates and for continuous pressure pulses using different carrier frequencies. A novel approach (continuous wavelet transformation) for detecting and decoding the received continuous pressure pulses in a noisy environment was applied to various simulated drilling operation conditions for data transmission in boreholes in the laboratory. The concept was registered at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) for a patent in 2011. The results indicate that the continuous wavelet transformation can be used to clearly identify and better detect the continuous pressure pulse periods, frequencies and discontinuity positions in the time domain compared to the conventional method (Fourier transformation). This method will contribute to the possibility of transmitting the data at higher rates and over longer distances. A concept for developing an innovative pulser using electrical discharge or acoustic sources for inducing pulses keeping the drill strings fully open (eliminating the problem of plugging the pulser by pumped lost circulation materials) and without any mechanical moving parts (eliminating the failure related to the pulser moving parts) was also registered at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) for a patent in 2012. With this pulser, it is expected that it would be possible to transmit the data over longer distances and at higher rates. Realizing the concept of the new pulser and using continuous wavelet transformation for detecting and decoding the pulser signal are recommended for future work.