A customer required to measure pitch, roll and azimuth on an aircraft but at the same time they had application processes to run that would link the GPS attitude and position data with a phased array radar. These were too processor extensive and needed a full PC to run them. However the PC had to be built in to the housing and the system had to have the capability for upgrading to take an inertial sensor.

FSL designed a multi-OEM4-L1/L2 GPS card system located in a housing with an 80586 processor that enabled attitude and position data to be computed using Waypoint’s RtkNav software. The output from RtkNav was reconfigured in a customised format for the phased array radar and output from the CPUPak-4 product.
The purpose built processor card has Ethernet, USB, RS232, RS422 and GUI interfaces. Due to the high vibration environment the processor mass storage was an IDE format compact flash of 1Gb capacity which was able to store data as well as hold the operating system and applications.

Spacecraft Formation Flying

Relative Positioning Using Dual-Frequency Carrier Phase