DUAL TELEMETRY SYSTEM PROVIDES COMPREHENSIVE TEST STRATEGY

Abstract

The Army’s continuing effort to develop self-guided, anti-tank weapon systems has been fueled by successful development of an earlier generation of smart weapons. These self-guided systems, also labeled “brilliant weapons,” will present a natural progression to “smart” weapons development and testing. What has been critical to the success of these smart weapons development programs has been an end-to-end testability provided by on-board telemetry methods. The end-to-end test procedures can be efficiently performed in a static laboratory environment where space is available. On board the smart weapon, end-to-end testability is less feasible due to space and bandwidth limitations. The STAFF XM943 projectile development program makes use of a dual telemetry link to transmit an array of measurements which characterize the performance of the projectile in and end-to-end fashion. The dual telemetry systems provide analog measurement capability to evaluate system component-level functions and digital measurement capability to evaluate a system processor which lends itself to computer processing. The digital data is intrinsic to smart weapon systems since they typically employ embedded microprocessors for projectile system control. The STAFF XM943 electronic system is controlled by a TMS320C30 microprocessor. The dual telemetry system employs a traditional FM/FM technique for monitoring a number of analog functions and a “quasi-traditional” PCM/FM scheme for digital transmission. This paper discusses the implementation of this dual telemetry approach for the XM943 Projectile System.