Summation Research, Inc. (SRI) proposes to enhance its commercially available radio frequency (RF) data communications and telemetry channel simulator to model and simulate complicated signal impairments due to the plasma sheath effects of hypersonic flight. This project proposes to identify Air Force stakeholders in the development and testing of hypersonic vehicles and demonstrate an enhanced telemetry signal simulator as a platform to generate and test multiple elements of communication links including modulation, coding, and channel impairments due to hypersonic flight dynamics through a plasma representative of real conditions encountered in atmospheric flight at high Mach numbers. The existing SRI RF Channel simulator generates common telemetry waveforms and encoding techniques, producing test signals and applying channel impairments typical of sub-sonic and low super-sonic flight characteristics including frequency, phase, and signal level changes. The simulator allows development and test engineers to model telemetry signals from vehicles during test flight flights. Additionally, pre-mission calibrations and validation of telemetry and command & control (C2) systems, enhances hardware-in-the-loop Live/Virtual/Constructive (LVC) simulations, and enables optimizing critical communications links. As vehicle RF performance simulations are refined, so too are the communications link simulations which provides significant risk reduction for expensive and limited flight test opportunities.
