ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses command composition and strategies, the problems encountered in transmitting commands, and the impacts of commanding that lead to corruption by the links. It describes the fields found in a typical command and provides reasons for their usage and explores operational impacts and considerations in the design of a command system. Command systems play important parts in the overall payload/user systems. The command component of the system has become more important because payloads are not necessarily passive devices. The synchronization of the payload to the command data stream is analogous to the user segment’s synchronization of the telemetry data stream. When commanding a payload in continuous command mode, commands to the same payload subsystem may come too rapidly for the subsystem to process and execute them. Two problem areas occur in this accounting of the command history: lost commands and disagreements between the control station and payload.
