When hypersonic vehicles are tested over the Pacific Ocean, their telemetry signals will be captured by a new modular antenna system developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) in partnership with AV, formerly known as Blue Halo.
The Advanced Phased Array Antenna Technology (APAT) uses Radio Frequency System on Chip (RFSoC) technology. This allows the system to process signals directly on each antenna element and track multiple signals at once in different directions. Both ground-based and airborne versions of APAT have been built and tested for collecting telemetry data sent from vehicles during flight tests.
The Pentagon’s Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) commissioned the APAT system. It combines commercial-off-the-shelf parts with custom antenna elements and a unique system architecture. GTRI describes APAT as its largest all-digital antenna system to date, building on more than 25 years of experience developing antennas.
“We’re combining RF-efficient aperture design with an intelligently-selected RF front-end that goes directly to digital so that when they’re tracking these telemetry streams, they can track multiple streams simultaneously,” said Kevin Cook, a GTRI principal research engineer who is co-principal investigator on the project. “In earlier analog systems, you’d have to just pick a stream or split the array (or multiple arrays) and lose signal gain. But with digital, you can track as many streams as you want, limited only by the system’s processing power.”
More information is available through the GTRI Newsroom.
