• A400M: Instrumentation Architecture for Flight Test

      Freaud, Gilles; Airbus (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      The Airbus A400M military transport plane carried out its first flight on December 2009 in Sevilla (Spain). This paper presents the flight and ground architecture designed to perform the flights tests campaign in Spain and in France. The core of the onboard flight test instrumentation is based on distributed network architecture already developed for A380 program. Airbus adapted civilian tests equipment for the A400M military program and various specific items have been designed specifically for this program. Two interconnected flight tests centres located in Sevilla (Spain) and Toulouse (France) are used for the flight tests campaign to ensure interoperability during the tests.
    • Accessing Chapter 10 Recorder Media from Windows PCs

      Kupferschmidt, Benjamin; Teletronics Technology Corporation (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      The RCC IRIG Chapter 10 standard requires that Chapter 10 recorders use the STANAG- 4575 (NATO Advanced Data Storage Interface) file system to store data files. The STANAG-4575 standard defines a linear file system in which each file is stored in a single contiguous block of disk space. There is a small directory listing at the beginning of the disk. This listing stores the starting position and length for each file. It also stores the file's name and its creation date and time. This file system is very efficient for storing files that are recorded sequentially because it does not require the disk to constantly update a file allocation table on each write. Unfortunately, the STANAG-4575 file system is not directly supported by Microsoft Windows. This means that it is not possible to simply attach a recorder's disk to a PC and copy the files directly using Windows Explorer. This paper will discuss an approach that allows the contents of a STANAG formatted disk to be read from a standard Windows PC. In addition to copying files from the disk, this approach allows several other useful operations to be performed on the disk. These operations include advanced copy options such as partial file copies and splitting files into multiple pieces. It can also provide a mechanism for deleting files, reformatting the disk and performing a sanitization procedure on a disk to declassify it.
    • Adapting Fourier Analysis for Predicting Earth, Mars and Lunar Orbiting Satellite's Telemetry Behavior

      Losik, Len; Failure Analysis (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      Prognostic technology uses a series of algorithms, combined forms a prognostic-based inference engine (PBIE) for the identification of deterministic behavior embedded in completely normal appearing telemetry from fully functional equipment. The algorithms used to define normal behavior in the PBIE from which deterministic behavior is identified can be adapted to quantify normal spacecraft telemetry behavior while in orbit about a moon or planet or during interplanetary travel. Time-series analog engineering data (telemetry) from orbiting satellites and interplanetary spacecraft are defined by harmonic and non-harmonic influences, which shape it behavior. Spectrum analysis can be used to understand and quantify the fundamental behavior of spacecraft analog telemetry and relate the behavior's frequency and phase to its time-series behavior through Fourier analysis.
    • Advanced Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing Assures RF Communication System Success

      Williams, Steve; RT Logic (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      RF Communication (COMMS) systems where receivers and transmitters are in motion must be proven rigorously over an array of natural RF link perturbations such as Carrier Doppler shift, Signal Doppler shift, delay, path loss and noise. These perturbations play significant roles in COMMS systems involving satellites, aircraft, UAVs, missiles, targets and ground stations. In these applications, COMMS system devices must also be tested against increasingly sophisticated intentional and unintentional interference, which must result in negligible impact on quality of service. Field testing and use of traditional test and measurement equipment will need to be substantially augmented with physics-compliant channel emulation equipment that broadens the scope, depth and coverage of such tests, while decreasing R&D and test costs and driving in quality. This paper describes dynamic link emulation driven by advanced antenna and motion modeling, detailed propagation models and link budget methods for realistic, nominal and worst-case hardware-in-the-loop test and verification.
    • Advanced Test Range Verification at RF Without Flights

      Williams, Steve; RT Logic (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      Flight and weapons test ranges typically include multiple Telemetry Sites (TM Sites) that receive telemetry from platforms being flown on the range. Received telemetry is processed and forwarded by them to a Range Control Center (RCC) which is responsible for flight safety, and for delivering captured best source telemetry to those responsible for the platform being flown. When range equipment or operations are impaired in their ability to receive telemetry or process it correctly, expensive and/or one-of-a-kind platforms may have to be destroyed in flight to maintain safety margins, resulting in substantial monetary loss, valuable data loss, schedule disruption and potential safety concerns. Less severe telemetry disruptions can also result in missing or garbled telemetry data, negatively impacting platform test, analysis and design modification cycles. This paper provides a high level overview of a physics-compliant Range Test System (RTS) built upon Radio Frequency (RF) Channel Simulator technology. The system is useful in verifying range operation with most range equipment configured to function as in an actual mission. The system generates RF signals with appropriate RF link effects associated with range and range rate between the flight platform and multiple telemetry tracking stations. It also emulates flight and RF characteristics of the platform, to include signal parameters, antenna modeling, body shielding and accurate flight parameters. The system is useful for hardware, software, firmware and process testing, regression testing, and fault detection test, as well as range customer assurance, and range personnel training against nominal and worst-case conditions.
    • Aeronautical Channel Simulation in Network Simulators for Incorporation into OPNET

      Dean, Richard; Zhang, Tianyin; Jaber, Nur; Morgan State University (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      This paper discusses channel simulation using OPNET Modeler in support of iNET. It shows how wireless communication is simulated, how to simulate the special aeronautical channel of iNET, and how to deliver the aeronautical channel, test article, and ground station as reusable components for future simulation. Network simulation is a critical tool for iNET and it enables design decisions that cannot be made analytically due to the complexity of the problem. This work addresses the incorporation of the aeronautical channel into the OPNET Modeler tool set as this piece of iNET is unique and is not available in OPNET Modeler.
    • Analysis of a Geolocation-Assisted Routing Protocol for Airborne Telemetry Networks

      Sterbenz, James P. G.; Peters, Kevin; Çetinkaya, Egemen K.; Jabbar, Abdul; University of Kansas (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      Emerging networked telemetry systems require domain-specific routing protocols, such as AeroRP, to cope with the challenges faced by the aeronautical environment. We present an ns-3 based performance analysis of the geolocation-based forwarding and store-and-haul mechanisms used by AeroRP. The analysis of the simulations shows AeroRP has several advantages over other MANET routing protocols and offers tradeoffs for different performance metrics in the form of different AeroRP modes.
    • Bulk Creation of Data Acquisition Parameters

      Kupferschmidt, Benjamin; Teletronics Technology Corporation (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      Modern data acquisition systems can be very time consuming to configure. The most time consuming aspect of configuring a data acquisition system is defining the measurements that the system will collect. Each measurement has to be uniquely identified in the system and the system needs to know what data the measurement will sample. Data acquisition systems are capable of sampling thousands of measurements in a single test flight. If all of the measurements are created by hand, it can take many hours to input all of the required measurements into the data acquisition system's setup software. This process can also be extremely tedious since many measurements are very similar. This paper will examine several possible solutions to the problem of rapidly creating large numbers of data acquisition measurements. If the list of measurements that need to be created already exists in an electronic format then the simplest approach would be to create an importer. The two main ways to import data are XML and comma separated value files. This paper will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. In addition to importers, this paper will discuss a system that can be used to create large numbers of similar measurements very quickly. This system is ideally suited to MILSTD- 1553 and ARINC-429 bus data. It exploits the fact that most bus measurements are typically very similar to each other. For example, 1553 measurements typically differ only in terms of the command word and the selected data words. This system allows the user to specify ranges of data words for each command word. It can then create the measurements based on the user specified ranges.
    • Channel Equalization and Spatial Diversity for Aeronautical Telemetry Applications

      Saquib, M.; Williams, Ian E.; University of Texas at Dallas (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      This work explores aeronautical telemetry communication performance with the SOQPSK- TG ARTM waveforms when frequency-selective multipath corrupts received information symbols. A multi-antenna equalization scheme is presented where each antenna's unique multipath channel is equalized using a pilot-aided optimal linear minimum mean-square error filter. Following independent channel equalization, a maximal ratio combining technique is used to generate a single receiver output for detection. This multi-antenna equalization process is shown to improve detection performance over maximal ratio combining alone.
    • Compressed Sensing Using Reed-Solomon and Q-Ary LDPC Codes

      Ryan, William E.; Marcellin, Michael W.; Goodman, Nathan A.; Jagiello, Kristin M.; University of Arizona (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      We consider the use of Reed-Solomon (RS) and q-ary LDPC codes for compressed sensing of sparse signals. Signals sensed using the RS parity-check matrix are recovered using Berlekamp-Massey and those sensed using the LDPC parity-check matrix are recovered using majority-logic decoding. Results are presented for both types of sensing. In addition, a hardware architecture is discussed.
    • Data Embedding in Video Telemetry Systems

      Dolan, P.; MIT Lincoln Laboratory (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      This paper presents a technique for embedding a digital data stream within a digital video stream using wavelet and nonlinear subband decompositions. This technique may enable more efficient use of radio frequency (RF) spectrum and a reduction in hardware necessary to transmit one or more narrowband data streams on a payload that incorporates a digital video camera. Several data embedding examples are presented which show how relatively large payloads can be embedded in even a single image with little noticeable degradation in image quality.
    • Decoding and Turbo Equalization for LDPC Codes Based on Nonlinear Programming

      Iltis, Ronald A.; University of California, Santa Barbara (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      Decoding and Turbo Equalization (TEQ) algorithms based on the Sum-Product Algorithm (SPA) are well established for LDPC codes. However there is increasing interest in linear and nonlinear programming (NLP)-based decoders which may offer computational and performance advantages over the SPA. We present NLP decoders and Turbo equalizers based on an Augmented Lagrangian formulation of the decoding problem. The decoders update estimates of both the Lagrange multipliers and transmitted codeword while solving an approximate quadratic programming problem. Simulation results show that the NLP decoder performance is intermediate between the SPA and bit-flipping algorithms. The NLP may thus be attractive in some applications as it eliminates the tanh/atanh computations in the SPA.
    • Describing Telemetry Systems with the Metadata Description Language

      Moore, Michael S.; Price, Jeremy C.; Cormier, Andrew R.; Thibodeaux, Ryan J.; Abbott, Ben A.; Malatesta, William A.; Southwest Research Institute; Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      The integrated Network-Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) project has developed standards to enhance telemetry systems for the twenty-first century. A foundational component of these standards is the Metadata Description Language (MDL). MDL is an eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based language for describing requirements, design choices, and configuration parameters of a Telemetry Network System (TmNS). Within a TmNS, MDL guides the exchange of information between applications and the configuration of network devices. Recent initial evaluations assessed MDL in terms of the expressive power of the language and the level of effort in developing applications that utilize MDL Instance Documents. Performing these initial evaluations required the generation of MDL Instance Documents to describe scenarios representative of both near-term and future telemetry systems that express different levels of iNET interoperability. These initial evaluations determined quantitative metrics such as file size, memory requirements, and required parsing time for MDL Instance Documents, and further evaluations judged the efficacy and complexity of MDL for describing and configuring a TmNS.
    • Design and Analysis of a 3-D Gauss-Markov Model for Highly Dynamic Airborne Networks

      Sterbenz, James P. G.; Broyles, Dan; Jabbar, Abdul; University of Kansas (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      Accurate mobility models are needed to simulate the physical movement of nodes in a highly-dynamic aeronautical network. The fundamental problem with many synthetic mobility models is their random, memoryless behavior. Airborne ad hoc networks require a flexible memory-based 3-dimensional mobility model. We present a new 3-dimensional implementation of the Gauss-Markov mobility model for airborne telemetry network simulations, and compare its behavior to memoryless models such as random waypoint and random walk using the ns-3 simulator.
    • The Design of an Application Used for Aircraft Stability Evaluation

      Leite, Nelson Paiva Oliveira; Lopes, Leonardo Mauricio de Faria; Walter, Fernando; Grupo Especial de Ensaios em Vôo; Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      One of the most important characteristics of an aircraft is its capability to return to its stable trimmed flight state after the occurrence of a disturbance or gust without the pilot intervention. The evaluation of such behavior, known as the aircraft stability, is divided into three sections: Lateral; Directional; and Longitudinal stabilities. The determination of the stability of an experimental aircraft requires the execution of a Flight Test Campaign (FTC). For the stability FTC the test bed should be equipped with a complete Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) System which is typically composed by: a Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) Data Acquisition System (DAS); A sensor set; An airborne transmitter; and A data recorder. In the real-time operations, live data received over the Telemetry Link, that are processed, distributed and displayed at the Ground Telemetry System (GTS) enhances the FTC safety level and efficiency. The due to the lack of reliability, recorded data is retrieved in the post mission operations to allow the execution of data reduction analysis. This process is time consuming because recorded data has to be downloaded, converted to Engineering Units (EU), sliced, filtered and processed. The reason for the usage of this less efficient process relies in the fact that the real-time Telemetry data is less reliable as compared to recorded data (i.e. noisier). The upcoming iNET technology could provide a very reliable Telemetry Link. Therefore the data reduction analysis can be executed with live telemetry data in quasi-real time after the receipt of all valid tests points. In this sense the Brazilian Flight Test Group (GEEV) along with EMBRAER and with the support of Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos (FINEP) started the development of several applications. This paper presents the design of a tool used in the Longitudinal Static Stability Flight Tests Campaign. The application receives the Telemetry data over either a TCP/IP or a SCRAMnet Network, performs data analysis and test point validation in real time and when all points are gathered it performs the data reduction analysis and automatically creates Hyper Terminal Markup Language (HTML) formatted tests reports. The tool evaluation was executed with the instruction flights for the 2009 Brazilian Flight Test School (CEV). The result shows an efficiency gain for the overall FTC.
    • Development and Analysis Cloud

      Self, Lance; Kirtland Air Force Base (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      The development and analysis cloud is a rapid development system being designed to support the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) Simulation & Technology Assessment Branch. The purpose is to isolate research, development, test, and evaluation of unique software within a Zone D enclave [1] to allow researchers and analysts to develop and test software free of the many IT requirements that hamper development and without risk of contaminating the overall Air Force network. The cloud system is being designed so researchers and analysts will utilize Software as a Service (SaaS) models. Such a model makes it transparent to users such things as where the software originates and any licensing concerns. Utilities, tools, and other enhancing software that users need are published and using them frees the developer to focus on their specific development efforts versus tertiary development modules.
    • Digital Cross-Polar Interference Canceller

      Thesling, Bill; ViaSat, Inc. (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      Dual-polarized data transmission promises to double the system capacity by transmitting independent signals simultaneously on both polarizations in the same channel. However, the polarization orthogonality of the propagation field can not always be perfectly preserved in various environments. Also the antenna and waveguide networks may not be able to achieve absolute polarization isolation. Therefore cross-polarization interference becomes a severe source of performance degradation in dual-polar systems. This paper presents an all-digital design of the cross-polarization interference canceller (XPIC or CPIC). This canceller is designed to remove the cross-polar interference so that comparable performance to single-polar system can be achieved for each polarization. Specifically, this digital design aims for • Mitigating the cross-polarization interference caused primarily by antenna orientation. (Delay between the signals from both polarizations is considered insignificant.) • Can operate with time varying cross-polar interference varying at rates of 2-3 Hz and beyond. • Initial isolation can be as low as 10 dB. • Is well suited to an all digital modem where clocking from the A/D is independent of symbol timing recovery clocks.
    • Direct Spatial Antenna Modulation for Wideband Phase Control

      Uhl, Brecken; Invertix Corporation (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      Direct spatial antenna modulation (DSAM) is a new approach to phased array control that opens up new "smart antenna" architecture possibilities. The DSAM technique leverages the inherent spatial differences of excitation in an antenna in a novel way to achieve the equivalent of conventional modulation and beam control effects. Smart antenna techniques are of potentially increasing importance to test range operations given a trend toward more flexible, internetworked, and autonomous test activities. The DSAM technique has been demonstrated through several generations of analysis, simulation, and prototyping, but has previously only been applied to narrowband antenna designs. Furthermore, the IQ DSAM approach in particular has not been previously implemented in hardware. This paper details the application of IQ DSAM to achieve wideband phase control using a commercial off the shelf (COTS) antenna. The phase control performance of IQ DSAM over a range of 1.5 GHz to 4 GHz is measured across relative field control angles of +/- 45 degrees. The measured IQ DSAM performance is compared to what could be expected from a conventional phased array element control architecture.
    • Dynamic Formatting of the Test Article Data Stream

      Young, Tom; Wigent, Mark; AFFTC; SAIC (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
    • Dynamic Frequency Assignment and Management Technologies for Future Test and Evaluation Operations

      Painter, Michael K.; Fernandes, Ronald; Gohlke, Jason; Ramachandran, Satheesh; Verma, Ajay; Jones, Charles H.; Knowledge Based Systems, Inc.; Edwards Air Force Base (International Foundation for Telemetering, 2010-10)
      There is growing concern that the U.S. military can no longer meet its domestic and international spectrum needs. Demand for this resource is growing at an exponential pace, both within the Department of Defense (DoD) and in the commercial sector (partly due to rapid growth in broadband wireless electronics). A microcosm of these challenges is evident in flight test operations, where there is a growing need for advanced spectrum assignment, frequency deconfliction, and scheduling optimization decision support capabilities. This paper describes research aimed at investigating how to optimize frequency scheduling, dynamic assignment, and real-time metrics adjustment to promote assured access to the electronic spectrum, including emerging technology developments to support that need.