The UCR gamma ray telescope data acquisition system

A description is given of an electronics system based on the DEC Falcon SBC-11/23+, which has been designed and built to support a balloon-borne double Compton gamma-ray telescope. The system provides support for commands, data acquisition, data routing and compression, and photomultiplier tube gain control. The software consists of a number of interrupt-driven routines of differing priorities to handle each system task. This includes two circular buffers for onboard processing and bit encoding before transmission of the information to the ground computer. Acquisition of gamma-ray events at rates above the 200-Hz telemetry constraint is easily achieved.<
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