Measurement and Characterization of Power Lines of Aircraft Flight Test Instrumentation

This paper presents a statistical characterization of power lines used by the flight test instrumentation of a corporate jet as a medium for data communication purposes. We quantify the main parameters that drive the design of power line communication technologies at the physical layer. We show that the limit of -83.01 dBm/Hz on the power spectral density (1.7-86 MHz), imposed by the standard RTCA/DO160, results in data rates as high as 90 Mb/s.