News from the company that's...
Reinventing Telemetry™
June, 2022
Twenty Years of...
Reinventing Telemetry™
Quasonix was founded in 2002 with the purpose of filling a void in the flight-test telemetry market for a company dedicated to the development and deployment of advanced telemetry products. Quasonix’s core tenet of exceeding customer expectations continues today with the development of products that push the envelope of spectral efficiency, power efficiency, size, packaging, and user-friendliness. Quasonix continually breaks new ground and stands apart as the market’s key innovator – elevating the performance of existing products, conceiving and developing new products to fill completely unmet needs, and advancing the industry as a whole through contributions to IRIG 106 standards.
In 2018, Terry Hill – owner and president of Quasonix and inventor of the SOQPSK waveform – was recognized with the ITC Pioneer Award for his broad array of contributions to telemetry. As he said during his acceptance: “The award has my name on it, and I’m immensely grateful and honored, but I have to say, I need to share it. Yes, I’ve had some good ideas over the years, but without the team that I work with – that’s the engineering team, manufacturing, testing, the sales team – everyone who takes those ideas and turns them into real products – well, they would just be ideas.”
As we celebrate our anniversary, we’re proud to look back on a few highlights from our Twenty Years Of… Reinventing Telemetry™.
2002 Quasonix opens for business
2004 First TIMTER transmitter ships
2007 First RDMS™ receiver ships
2013 LDPC Coding introduced
2014 STC introduced,
First Receiver Analyzer ships
2015 DQE/DQM introduced,
EVTM introduced,
LDPC Coding added to IRIG 106-15,
STC added to IRIG 106-15
2017 DQE/DQM added to IRIG 106-17,
First Status Logger ships
2018 BCS introduced,
First QTrack™ antenna ships
2019 All-digital antenna control protocol introduced
2021 First HyperTrack™ system installed
Though there may be laurels in our commemorative anniversary logo, we’ll never be satisfied resting on them. Here’s to our next twenty years of innovation and leadership, and to the ongoing contributions we will make for the flight-test telemetry community.
COMING SOON: Receiver Analyzer 3.0
Prepare to get more from your existing Receiver Analyzer with this free upgrade.
Quasonix’s Receiver Analyzer is your go-to tool for verifying your pre-flight receiver configuration. With a system-wide total of four signal sources and six channel path emulators, complex scenarios can be effectively modeled and tested, allowing you to “measure twice, launch once”.
The next generation of Receiver Analyzer is in development and will soon be available as a free upgrade. Version 3.0 unleashes even more of the hardware’s power and allows you far greater control in the setup of your testing. Here are just a few of the improvements you’ll see:
- Vastly improved performance, with nearly real-time response. Whether you describe the enhancement as “stunningly better” or a “night and day difference”, we’re sure you’re bound to notice.
- A completely overhauled user interface that is highly configurable and flexible. Put what you want where you want it on the screen, optimizing the configuration for the tests you’re running.
- User-customizable integrated graphics to quickly assess the data you care about directly in the UI, plus a results export for aggregation and further analysis offline.
- The ability to extract DQM from DQE streams, enabling an array of new performance measurements and allowing for the calibration of DQM.
- More modular, adaptable, and automatable configuration of your tests. If the hardware can generate it, you can access it, now with virtually unlimited combinations.
Here are two examples of the integrated graphics – in this case, related to the calibration of DQM:
Additional information will become available closer to launch. In the meantime, contact us at sales@quasonix.com if you’re interested in learning more.
Zen and the Art of Antenna Maintenance
Protect your sound investment and gain peace of mind through periodic inspections and routine maintenance of your system.
Quasonix’s HyperTrack™ systems are gaining in popularity with our customers, in no small part due to their unrivaled performance in tracking speed, tracking accuracy, and data retrieval.
These cutting-edge systems combine the latest processing and network technologies with mechanical robustness descended from our proven legacy platform, with many systems in the field for over a decade and still performing flawlessly. Our confidence in this design is such that we now provide a new industry benchmark: a standard a three-year warranty on all our HyperTrack™ antenna systems. This is only possible by engineering and manufacturing to standards our competition would probably consider to be “overdesigned”.
Environmental challenges abound. Here are the most significant ones that antennas face and principal risk mitigations employed by Quasonix:
- Ultraviolet damage: The use of ultra-violet protective paint; UV resistant material coated cables; sun shields wherever possible
- Precipitation and humidity: Positive pressurization of all outdoor equipment; the use of O rings (not gaskets); integrated dehydrating pressurizer for all outdoor equipment
- Excessive wind and icing: Robust mechanical design; heaters and dehydrated positive pressure
- Corrosion, mold, and mildew: Use of industrial and military grade materials and hardware
But even the best systems need a little love. Most of the breakdowns we see in field could have been detected and fixed before they went from “nothing to be concerned with” to expensive and problematic, resulting in antenna downtime.
The solution is routine inspection.
Things to look out for:
- Paint peeling from weldments and radomes
- Visible metal corrosion (on the weldments and hardware etc.)
- Deterioration of cables and connectors including cracking and peeling
- Cracking, defoliation, and discoloration of composites (radomes and reflectors)
- And most importantly: Dehydrator status alarms, or any signs of incorrect dehydrator operation
Three-year warranty:
Quasonix is dedicated to protecting our customers and their investment.
The three-year warranty on HyperTrack™ systems requires periodic inspection, which allows us to resolve issues before they become problems. Quasonix publishes a maintenance log/procedure with each HyperTrack™ system so that end users can protect the life of these systems.
If these HyperTrack™ systems are periodically checked, we anticipate they will perform well for at least twenty years – probably more.
RDMS™ Release 19.3 Now Available
Update your receiver’s software today and start taking advantage of the latest features. It’s free and can be done via network connection or by SD card.
Here are a few of the improvements you’ll see in Release 19.3:
- Software and firmware enhancements for the latest version of the RDMS Compact Receiver-Combiner (CRC)
- Continued enhancement and bug fixes of the STRCI interface implementation of the RDMS API
- Fix for issue introduced in R19.2 where an incorrect timestamp was applied when using a Status Logger
To receive release notes, update cards or packages, if you have any questions about this update, or if you have recommendations for future enhancements, please contact support@quasonix.com.
Keep the feedback coming! Your suggestions continue to have a significant impact on our development plans.