Development of an Airborne Telemetry Relay System Using Aircraft

A telemetry signal occurs the line-of-sight problem by the effect of geography in flight test. A fixed relay system or a mobile relay system is used to solve that problem in general but we propose an airborne telemetry relay system using aircraft in this paper. An airborne telemetry relay system receives the telemetry signal of the test vehicle and then retransmits it to the ground system. The receiving antenna which is a phased array antenna can be tilted to beam direction by beam-forming and track the rapidly moving test vehicle in effect. The relay pod which is mounted to an aircraft consists of the front antenna and the side antenna. It receives S-band signal and then down-converts the frequency to L-band signal. As a result, that can remove the frequency interference on an aircraft while retransmitting.