The philosophy and development of an automatic checkout adapter for an air-borne electric power system

The demand for automatic checkout of complex air-borne equipment has become a major item in ground-support equipment, and as a result, many basic equipments have been developed and built for this purpose. The concept of the basic equipment is to produce a component capable of testing any present-day or proposed future electronic system. To do this the test apparatus is divided into two parts; one which is generally referred to as the automatic checkout equipment, and one which is usually called an adapter. The automatic checkout equipment for this application uses a binary coded digital program which is read from a tape and which establishes all the major functions of the test equipment. In this instance the basic unit, that is, the automatic checkout equipment, has the capability of reading four basic parameters: frequency, time, voltage, and resistance. These four functional capabilities establish the criteria for the operation of the adapter which must interrogate the air-borne electrical system and present an analog signal in terms of one of the functional categories.