Operation and modeling of the FORTE trigger box
NM (United States) Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), T Murphy, USDOE, Washington, DC (United States) (US) · 1996
The fast on-orbit recording of transient events satellite (FORTE) will carry a multiple-narrow-band trigger designed to detect impulsive VHF signals embedded in a high-noise background. The FORTE trigger boxes consist of eight VHF channels spaced across twenty MHz of bandwidth. A trigger is generated when a sufficiently bright signal is seen in a user-defined number of these channels within a specified coincidence window. In addition, the trigger circuitry incorporates a feature to reject events caused by the actuation of narrow-band carriers. This report describes the trigger`s operating principles and their implementation in the satellite hardware. We then discuss a computer model which can be used to simulate the performance of the trigger circuit.