Telemetry Band Augmentation: An Agenda Item at the Next World Radio Communication Council

Gerhard K.L. Mayer, GVM-Consulting, Germany
Steve W. Lyons, QinetiQ, United Kingdom
Timothy A. Chalfant, Edwards AFB, CA, United States of America

Abstract

One of the significant factors affecting combined operations is the planning, scheduling, and utilisation of telemetry and telecommand spectrum to support next generation platform development and to support operational tests conducted in combined environments (air, land, sea and space). Due to commercial spectrum encroachment and the resultant reallocation legislation, the increasing (flight test) need for realtime data display and analysis is quickly becoming unsupportable in the existing bands.

Several research efforts have increased telemetry efficiency by decreasing the amount of spectrum needed to transmit information. These techniques, promising a two to three fold increase, still can’t address the need for future wide-band telemetry, which is growing exponentially.

This has generated a call to look for additional radio frequency spectrum allocations to augment the existing telemetry bands. This need is shared by the international community and has generated an agenda item for the next meeting of the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC). Due to the international impact of spectrum encroachment on telemetry users, the International Foundation for Telemetering established an information interchange forum, called the International Consortium for Telemetry Spectrum (ICTS), to support this critical requirement. It is necessary that all telemetry users support a positive response to this WRC agenda item to meet the needs of future test programmes.