TELEMETRY SYSTEMS OF THE FUTURE

Abstract

The next 25 years will bring about a revolution in telemetry acquisition and processing. Airborne systems will become smaller and faster, providing additional monitoring and processing capabilities to test vehicles. In addition, ultra-high speed on-board data networks will provide communications between data collection and processing units. The telemetry platforms of tomorrow will be required to collect the entire contents of the data network, in a manner similar to today’s MIL-STD 1553 technology. The ground station of tomorrow will be required to process this bus information and provide it to the users for analysis. Ground station components, including intelligent front-ends and host processors could easily be replaced by a combination of on-board communication network processors (similar to the current 1553 processors) linked to a ground system data network. Processing could be shifted to the vehicle while ground functions remain dedicated to recording and analysis. Specialized workstations will provide for user analysis, history recording, and display. Ground networks will use shared (reflected) memory concepts to provide for addition of unlimited workstations separated by much greater distances than are associated with today’s shared memory systems.