THE EVALUATION AND INTEGRATION OF AN INSTRUMENTATION AND TELEMETRY SYSTEM WITH SOQPSK MODULATION AND CONTROL INTEGRATED WITH AVIONICS DISPLAYS

Abstract

This paper describes the integration activities associated with the instrumentation and telemetry system developed for an F/A-18 Hornet Flight Test program, including bench integration, avionics integration, and aircraft ground and flight checkout. The system is controlled by a Boeing Integrated Defense System (IDS) Flight Test Instrumentation designed Instrumentation Control Unit (ICU), which interfaces to an avionics pilot display and Ground Support Unit (GSU) to set up the instrumentation during preflight and control the instrumentation during flight. The system takes in MIL-STD-1553, analog parameters, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and video, and records these with onboard recorders. Selected subsets of this data may be routed to the telemetry system, which features two RF streams, each of which contains up to four PCM streams combined into a composite by a data combiner. The RF streams are transmitted by multi-mode digital transmitters capable of PCM-FM or Shaped Offset Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (SOQPSK), with selectable Turbo-Product Code (TPC) Forward Error Correction (FEC). This paper describes integration of the system with the IDS Flight Test Integration Test Bench (ITB), production avionics integration facilities, and final aircraft ground checkout and initial flight tests. It describes results of integration activities and bench evaluation of the telemetry system.