No abstract

The beacon track and performance telemetry system used in the various Project West Ford communication pay loads is described. The dipole dispensing rate, the dispenser spin, tumble and temperature, as well as the system power-supply voltage, were measured and transmitted to the West Ford sites by means of a pulse-duration modulation system. In addition, the telemetry transmitter served as a beacon for accurate ground-based radar tracking of the pay loads. The most important system considerations were efficiency, low power, simplicity, and high reliability. A tabulation of the received data and the interpretation of the data are given.

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The selection of the optimum four satellites to use in global positioning system navigation results in a substantial computational load. This paper discusses techniques for reducing this computational load by choosing sets of satellites which, although not always the optimum, are adequate for the job. A suboptimal choice of five satellites in low-cost sequential systems is proposed and shown to usually have better performance than the optimally chosen four satellites, even though chosen with a greatly reduced number of computations.

No abstract