Monitoring Van, Base Station

This is our Ground Station Reference van.  Here the Base station GPS units were stationed with known set point. wither it was calculated or surveyed we input the location in longitude and latitude, and also elevation.  As the GPS accuracies are changed we can calculate the corrections and send them to the remote units to calculate an accurate position.  This is a fully mobile unit with equipment onboard for operations, service, and data acquisitions.

This van has an onboard IBM compatible PC.  It is equipped with two serial ports with 16550 UART's for interfacing with equipment for data transfer, and also with a bi-directional Printer port for an 8-bit transfer for a faster link.

This has a total of 4 GIG's of storage for data storage and used for logging all remote data, positions, and also for logging all data used for post processing for our test stage.  We have been logging all data we can to verify the accuracies of all GPS units and also to verify the remote control linking.

This is also used to initialize the GPS units for operations and to also change operations and fine tune equipment while equipment is also being used without interrupting operations.

This PC is common parts that are easy to service or replace while in use.

The computer is equipped with a Sound Card with a DSP that is used to record the radio on board the van to audibly record station data.  The frequency used for this is 408.0125MHZ, when keyed from the field it sends a mark onto the remote GPS, and with the voice data transmitted it is recorded back at this van with a time and date stamp to when the even occurred.  The marked data (usually position) is also sent back via TNC's as ASCII data to this computer to be logged to a file to be matched with the voice and time, date also.