Vox Spectrum successfully creates a radio audit trail for the Indian Space Research Organisation

The Customer

ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organisation, was formed in 1969, with the mandate to develop satellite launch capabilities to serve India’s needs. With spectacular success, ISRO built the ability to launch any kind of satellite into any orbit, and has put India in the select club of six countries with satellite launch capability.

Being a technology-driven organisation, ISRO is very selective about its solution providers. Vox Spectrum was honoured to be invited to address a specific challenge that ISRO faced.

The Challenge

ISRO has a very aggressive launch schedule, with several launches every year. Each launch involves the perfect co-ordination of activities of many teams, each working under pressure.

These teams communicate largely through radio, as their activities are spread throughout ISRO’s dispersed launch site at Sriharikota, near the city of Chennai in South India.

The challenge was that there was no audit trail for post-launch analysis. Vital commands would be given on radio, but ISRO did not have the ability to log them and replay them on demand to trace the pattern of events that led to a particular end.

ISRO’s internal systems were coordinated using a time signal generated by a specially designed system. Using a 1KHz tone, this signal encoded the current time to an accuracy of 1 millisecond. ISRO’s design engineers decided that they need a voice log of all radio conversations, encoded along with the time signal, which they could play back in a time-synchronised pattern. Their dedicated time display device would decode the signal when necessary. Vox Spectrum was invited to provide a solution to address this need.

The Solution

Vox Spectrum engineers analysed the customer requirements and devised a cost-effective solution that met all ISRO’s needs. Vox provided an 16 channel analogue system that was patched into the radio frequencies that ISRO needed to monitor. One of these channels was dedicated to recording the input from the time device.

When a record was played, the audio file was played back in synchronisation with the encoded time signal, though separate audio output devices. The time signal output went to a dedicated decoder, which displayed the time on a LED display device, while the audio signal went to standard speakers or headphones.

The solution was deployed in April 2003, and has been working to ISRO’s utmost satisfaction ever since. ISRO has since placed repeat orders for similar systems for their other launch facilities.