DIS Link Monitor for Windows
Introduction
This application is designed to run on a PC with a minimum configuration of 400MHz Pentium, screen resolution of 1280 by 1024 and a minimum of 20MB of RAM available over and above the RAM used by Windows. The application has been tested on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 & Windows XP.
What DIS Link Monitor is NOT
The DIS Link Monitor is not a Stealth Viewer and does not provided a three dimensional view of the entities. It is not a fully fledged Scenario Generator suitable for use during a DIS exercise. Nor is it application designed to be user application for participating in a DIS training exercise.
What DIS Link Monitor is Designed to Provide
The DIS Link Monitor has been designed as an Engineering tool to be used in a DIS environment. It is suitable for use by both personnel involved in the development and/or testing of DIS based applications, as well as personnel involved in planning, coordination and execution of DIS based exercises.
- Supports DIS Version 4,5 and 6. An option is provided to accept any valid DIS version on receive, and use the selected DIS version for transmission only.
- Supports both a single DIS LAN and dual DIS LANs for entity and radio PDUs. If the dual LAN option is selected, any PDU recordings will be played back with the Radio PDUs transmitted on the Radio LAN regardless of the original source at the time of recording.
- Provides monitoring and capture facilities for PDUs. Families supported are:
- Entity Interaction
- Warfare
- Logistics
- Radio Communications
- Simulation Management
- Distributed Emission Regeneration
- Entity management
- Minefield
- Synthetic Environment
- Simulation Management - R.
- Provides conversion of position expressed as X/Y/Z to Latitude/Longitude/Height.
- Provides conversion of velocity expressed as dX/dY/dZ to speed and heading.
- Provides conversion of orientation from euler angles to azimuth, roll and pitch.
- Provides capability to generate manually generated PDUs.
- Provides capability to generate specified Entity State PDUs (with Entity State Update).
- Provides a simple F/A-18 simulator with attached radar, IFF and radio.
- Provides a simple submarine simulator with Underwater Acoustic and SEES generation.
- Provides facilities to simulate a DIS Radio with selectable Transmitter parameters and a pre-recorded audio signal PDU stream..
- Provides a rich set of statistical monitoring functions.
- Generates simple English error messages for rejected PDUs.
Provides capability to record/playback DIS PDUs.
- Recording supports dual LAN operation for separation of data and radio PDUs
- Sessions recorded on a single LAN configuration may be replayed on a dual LAN configuration.
- Sessions recorded on a dual LAN configuration may be replayed on a single LAN configuration.
- Recording/Playback may be filtered on PDU Family.
- Session may be replayed using either the original Exercise ID's, or a specified Exercise ID.
- Replay supports random time positioning.
- Replay may be looped continuously.
- Replay may use original PDU timestamps or new timestamps.
Comparison of Facilities with MaK's Datalogger / Netdumper Utilities
The table below itemizes some of the major differences between the DIS Link Monitor (DLM) and MaK's Datalogger/Netdumper utilities.
| Function | DLM | MaK |
|---|---|---|
| Facility to select IP address to use from dialog box | Y | N |
| Support for dual LAN operation | Y | N |
| PDU Capture facility control from simple dialog box | Y | N |
| Interpret DIS parameters to Lat/Lon/Height/Yaw/Roll/Pitch | Y | N |
| Interpret various DIS enumerations | Some | Y |
| PDU Filter facility based on Family/Type | Y | N |
| Facility to allocate simulator Name to Site/Application | Y | N |
| Facility to generate Entity/Emitter/SEES/UA PDUs | Y | N |
| Facility to Launch Missiles/Chaff/Flare | Y | N |
| Facility to generate IFF PDUs | Y | N |
| Support for rx/tx of Exercise Management PDUs | Y | N |
| Facility to display/generate Comment PDUs | Y | N |
| Facility to Select Exercise ID to process dynamically | Y | N |
| Facility to Simulate a DIS Radio Transmitter | Y | N |
| Statistical analysis of traffic and PDU distribution | Y | N |
| Facility to Record/Replay DIS Session | Y | N |
| Facility to Replay at variable speed | N | Y |
| Display information about PDU Families within recording | Y | N |
| Facility to Record/Replay session using dual LANs | Y | N |
| Facility to replay recording using different Exercise ID | Y | N |
| Detection and reporting of illegal PDUs | Y | N |
| PPI Display of all entities on World Map | Y | N |
| Monitoring of equipment associated with platforms | Y | N |
| Facilities to monitor and correlate Transmitters/Signal/Rx | Y | N |
| Facilities to monitor Receivers receiving from Transmitter | Y | N |
Includes Support for Non-Standard PDUs
The latest version of DIS Link Monitor introduces support for non-standard PDUs by providing facilities for the definition and capture of Custom Defined PDUs.
Facilities are provided for the quick and easy definition of any arbitrary PDU by means of specifying each record as either a standard data type (byte, short, int etc.) or a defined data structure like for example TEntityID. The data structures may in turn be defined as consisting of standard data types, or other data structures. Each record, both standard data types and defined data structures, may be defined as repeated either a constant number of times, or the repeat count may be defined as any suitable earlier defined record within the PDU. The screen captures below show the definition for an Entity State PDU, and the resultant data capture display.
