A Cost Effective Solution for Time-Stamping Electronic Warfare System Response

Electronic warfare support (ES) systems receive and process RF data real-time and these systems are time critical. Hardware and software updates to existing ES systems are required to properly maintain these systems. Testing the hardware and software updates plays an important role for releasing the update into the field. The majority of this testing takes place in the laboratory. Two units of measure that are used to monitor the performance of an ES system are response time and age-out in addition to many others. Accurate timing information is required to measure the performance of an updated ES system. Many times the manual or automated instrumentation in laboratories is in place and does not have accurate time-stamping capability. This paper presents the hardware and software design of an external unit that can externally interface with any existing RF simulator to capture accurate timing information (time-stamp) for use in response time and age-out calculation. The hardware consists of two PCI bus cards. One for data acquisition and the other for accurate GPS time capture. A program was written in C++ using Visual Studio^reg.NET.