1 ADVANCED DISTRIBUTED WIDEBAND DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM

Wideband data acquisition units have been used as part of an instrumentation system for several decades. Historically, these units operated asynchronously from each other, and from the rest of the instrumentation system when installed on the same test vehicle. When many wideband units are required to slave their formats or sampling rate to the test vehicle’s event of interest such as external computer event clock, radar, or laser pulse train; few solutions were available. Additionally, a single test vehicle may use ten to thirty wideband units operating at up to 20 Mbps each. Such systems present a challenge to the instrumentation engineers to synchronize, transmit safety of flight information, and record. This paper will examine a distributed wideband data acquisition system in which each acquisition unit operates under its own data rate and format, yet remains fully synchronized to an external fixed or variable simultaneous sampling rate to provide total system coherency. The system aggregate rate can be as low as a few Mbps to as high as 1 Gbps. Data acquired from the acquisition units is further multiplexed per IRIG-106 chapter 10 using distributed data multiplexers for recording