Hundreds of sensors, avionics buses, video and a telemetry link, all on one time base, in an aircraft that was never designed for any of it. Here is the problem as we see it, and what we have brought to it since 1979.
scroll
THE PROBLEM
A campaign is not sized by the number of channels. It is sized by four budgets that pull on each other: bit rate, storage, telemetry link and installation. Miss one and the others shift under your feet.
The telemetry link will never carry everything the recorder captures. What goes down live, what stays on board and what margin is kept are choices to make on paper, with the ground team, before anything is bolted in.
Analog channels, MIL-STD-1553 and ARINC 429 traffic, video and the ground station must share one clock. Without it, correlating an event across sources becomes guesswork, and the campaign report inherits the doubt.
Cable mass, bay space, power and the qualification of the installation itself usually outweigh the boxes. Electronics that are compact, modular and already qualified change the size of the whole job.
THE ANSWER
A chain designed as one system rather than assembled from parts, by people who have spent four decades on flight lines.
Acquisition and recording on board with NanoX, NanoS2 or COD-R, transmission with TX-MOD, reception with the Ground Station, replay with D.T.MUX Viewer. One format policy, one point of contact when something has to change on a Friday.
Stackable modules, ultra-miniature units next to the sensors, rugged PTP switches to hold the network together. The architecture follows the aircraft, not the other way round.
IRIG 106 Chapter 10 for interoperability with your existing tools, the D.T.MUX format for robustness on the recorder. Lossless conversion either way, so the choice never locks you in.
DO-160G and MIL-STD-810 evidence available for the installation file, so the equipment is not the item that delays acceptance.
RELATED PRODUCTS
From the sensor to the ground: the units that make up a flight-test chain, and the software that reads what they record.
High-speed 1 Gbps acquisition / recording / replay / transmit.
VIEW MORE
Ultra-compact flight-test recorder, stackable modules, up to 2 TB.
VIEW MORE
Ultra-miniature DAQ, up to 128 channels, low-latency real-time TX.
VIEW MORE
On-board telemetry transmitter, 1–20 W, S / L / C-band.
VIEW MORE
8–24-port GbE managed switch, IEEE 1588 PTP, PoE+ option.
VIEW MORECASE STUDY
As a rule, we do not name our customers. The configurations are real; the identities are not.
A new variant of a high-performance light aircraft, a full flight-test installation, and a constraint that decides the architecture before anything else: all of it live, on one time reference.
Sampling at a megahertz is not difficult. Doing it in six places spread over several kilometres, and having every channel land on the same timeline, is the whole problem.
GO FURTHER
Nine stages, one time reference and a single governing rule: every stage can lose information and no stage can add any. A guide to the whole chain, and to knowing which link is your weakest.
Design & architectureFour budgets have to close at once — bit rate, storage, telemetry and mass — and they are coupled. Here is the arithmetic, done all the way through on a real-shaped installation.
Design & architectureThe question looks like an architecture debate. It is mostly geometry: how far your sensors are from each other, and who owns the mass of the harness.
Design & architectureEvery other measurement can be repeated. A timing error cannot: it is discovered months later, during analysis, and it invalidates every comparison that was built on it.
Acquisition & recordingThe file exists, it opens, and the curves look plausible. None of that is evidence. Here is the list of things that can be wrong with a recording, and which of them you can actually detect.
FREQUENTLY ASKED
From a handful on a COD-R to several hundred on a NanoX with its module set, and the units combine on the same network. The right question is the bit rate they produce together: that is what sizes the recorder and, above all, the telemetry link. Our sizing article walks through the calculation.
Both are recorded natively. Chapter 10 keeps you compatible with third-party analysis tools; the D.T.MUX format is built to survive interrupted recordings. D.T.MUX Converter translates between them without loss, so the decision follows your toolchain, not ours.
It depends on the configuration and on the installation approval more than on the hardware. The online configurators give a realistic starting point in ten minutes; from there we work with your integration team on the schedule.
OTHER APPLICATIONS
A parameter list, an aircraft type and a date are enough to start. Our engineers reply, not a sales script.
Talk to an engineer →Type at least two letters. Enter opens the first result.
