A helicopter company required a PCM combiner solution to complete a flight test instrumentation system. The supplier that was chosen to provide this solution encountered problems that would mean missing program delivery requirements. As this would compromise the overall program schedule, the helicopter company needed to obtain another solution within a year.
The PCM combiner needed to take up to eight PCM streams from third-party data acquisition units (DAU) and output three streams at different programmable bitrates.
Each output stream must be fully programmable to select parameters from the eight DAUs. The system needed to be highly reliable, with 99% data efficiency. Ideally, the solution would have zero data loss and no repeated samples.
Due to limited space and harsh environmental conditions of the platform, the solution needed to be compact and rugged. The customer also needed support for their in-house database for system programming and management.
