Approach To The Application Of Satellite Laser Ranging On Windows NT Style Operation System

Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) is one of the advanced space measuring techniques with highranging resolution and good practicability. There is a worldwide SLR network that consists ofmore than forty SLR stations. The SLR station of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO)is one of the important members and has long observation data sets adopted by the SLRcommunity.SHAO set up the whole SLR system in 1985, including both hardware and software, andkept upgradings of the system year by year. At the present time, by the need of some applicationsand also for adapting for the development of SLR software, we began to do study the applicationof SLR on the Windows NT style operation system. After almost one year's hard work, we haveprogrammed the software using VC++6.0 and have successfully fulfilled the SLR observations.We realized the communication between NT OS and devices by using a feasible dynamicallink library and virtual device drivers that bypass windows protection mechanism and allow32-bit windows application to directly access I/O ports. Also, the communications with serialport and other correlative boards are carried out.We adopted a kind of timer provided by VC++6.0 that has strong timing function andtiming resolution as good as one millisecond. In addition, the powerful ability of VC++6.0programming language can greatly help the realization of ranging functions such as timing,painting and other luther practical applications.