A MOBILE RANGE SYSTEM TO TRACK TELEMETRY FROM A HIGH-SPEED INSTRUMENTATION PACKAGE

Abstract

As renewal interest in building vehicles based on hypersonic technologies begin to emerge again, test ranges anticipating in supporting flight research of these vehicles will face a set of engineering problems. Most fundamentals of these will be to track and gather error free telemetry from the vehicles in flight. The first series of vehicles will likely be reduced-scale models that restrict the locations and geometric shapes of the telemetry antennas. High kinetic heating will further limit antenna design and construction. Consequently, antennas radiation patterns will be sub-optimal, showing lower gains and detrimental nulls. A mobile system designed to address the technical issues above will be described. The use of antenna arrays, spatial diversity and a hybrid tracking system using optical and electronic techniques to obtain error free telemetry in the present of multipath will be presented. System tests results will also be presented.