Resources & News

Systel has achieved AS9100:2016 Rev D certification. AS9100 is a widely adopted quality management system for the aerospace and defense industry, encompassing ISO 9001:2015 with additional rigorous requirements.

Would you like to improve your telemetry link? How about your post-mission analysis? Or maybe you’d like to reduce the time, cost, and frustration of troubleshooting the link in the first place? If any of those are true, then Data Quality is your new best friend.

The Data Quality Metric is a measure of received signal quality. More specifically, it is an estimate of bit error probability (BEP). Quasonix RDMS™ displays a streamlined version of DQM known simply as “Q,” which ranges from zero to ten. A zero means there is no confidence that the bits have been received correctly; a ten indicates that the probability of bit errors is less than one in ten billion – essentially perfect data. What’s “magical” about DQM is that it works all the time – with any data, even encrypted, and any data modulation. This is because determining the error probability of any given bit is done without knowing what the bit is supposed to be. DQM is calibrated and verified against a wide variety of signal impairments, making it not only highly accurate but also interoperable among equipment vendors. Because it reliably indicates the real-time likelihood of an error for every bit received, DQM enables several key benefits: It is at the heart of the Best Channel Selector (BCS) built into our RDMS™. End-to-end mission performance can be evaluated using a recording of DQM from the Status Logger with no knowledge of the received data. DQM is a great diagnostic tool. For example, if you know the signal is clean (Q = 10) but your decomm still won’t sync, it’s very likely that your baseband encoding at the transmit end doesn’t match the decoding at the receiving end (randomizer, differential encoding, etc.). To learn more about Data Quality and how it fits into troubleshooting your link setup, read our new guide, DQM and RDMS™ Troubleshooting.

Optimizing Telemetry Links in Mil-Aero Environments

With the growing complexity of flight test programs and the improved efficiency of compression algorithms, video is an ever increasing component of flight test data collection. This presentation offers a description of how video compression works and the trade-offs that can be made when selecting and implementing video compression components. It will also examine the effects of video compression on video quality and investigate some of the causes and resolutions of quality problems.

Abstract: This paper discusses the application of two of the latest video encoding approaches for test platforms, particularly in bandwidth-constrained and over imperfect (lossy) transmission links. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC or H.265) is compared with MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC or H.264), and the behavior of both in low bandwidth and lossy transmission channels is
explored, concentrating on the ability to transmit usable information over low bandwidth links using each approach. Comparison of the same video simultaneously compressed heavily for constrained links and lightly for on-board storage is used to illustrate the effects of heavy compression on video usability, as well as side-by-side comparison of the output of both video encoding algorithms as implemented in a rugged airborne package.