Telemetry and electronic systems testing on Orford Ness
What is telemetry?
Telemetry is the art of measurement at a distance, whereby a physical quantity being measured is transmitted to a distant station and there indicating or recording the quantity measured.
An example might be for an air-drop test of a bomb casing. A test parameter of interest, e.g. tail fin flutter, could be measured by a strain gauge transducer, converted into a radio signal by an onboard telemetering unit, and the results displayed or recorded at the receiving station.
Strictly speaking, telemetry covers transmission of data by wired as well as wireless techniques, so some of the first applications go back to the 19th century.
In the context of Orford Ness, we are mainly considering wireless telemetry, where the device under investigation is either airborne (e.g. a bomb casing dropped from an aircraft) or where the radio transmission features of a weapon are under investigation (e.g. the Blue Streak test rig).
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