Tactical disk recording system (TDRS)

The Tactical Disk Recording System (TDRS) is an electronic digital recording device. It is specifically designed to record imagery data. The TDRS is capable of reliable operation in various airborne environments including high performance military aircraft. The first TDRS application is the recording of Forward Looking Infrared video in the LANTIRN targeting pod that is flown on F-16s, F-15Es, and more recently F-14s. All the imagery and associated support data is stored to a removable 9 Gigabyte magnetic hard disk. The TDRS employs an internal JPEG compression engine that significantly enhances the available record time. The removable disk drive can be easily connected via a SCSI interface to a computer workstation. All the image and support data is stored in MS-DOS file formats, which facilitates easy viewing, evaluation, and distribution of the source data and derived work products. The magnetic disk technology has been successfully used on other military aircraft. It has demonstrated excellent reliability and it has proven to be a cost-effective means of non-volatile data storage. The use of this technology in the LANTIRN pod is expected to demonstrate the practicality of the TDRS as a dependable, high quality, affordable, digital image recorder.© (1997) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.