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Accelerometer

A device that measures proper acceleration ("g-force"). Proper acceleration is not the same as coordinate acceleration (rate of change of velocity). For example, an accelerometer at rest on the surface of the Earth will measure an acceleration g= 9.81 m/s2 straight upwards. By contrast, accelerometers in free fall orbiting and accelerating due to the gravity of Earth will measure zero.

View Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerometer

ADC

An analog-to-digital converter (ADC, A/D, or A to D) is a device that converts a continuous physical quantity (usually voltage) to a digital number that represents the quantity's amplitude.

View Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog-to-digital_converter

AES

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also referenced as Rijndael (its original name), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. AES is based on the Rijndael cipher developed by two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, who submitted a proposal to NIST during the AES selection process. Rijndael is a family of ciphers with different key and block sizes. For AES, NIST selected three members of the Rijndael family, each with a block size of 128 bits, but three different key lengths: 128, 192 and 256 bits.

View Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard

AFF

Automated flight following (AFF) is GPS aircraft tracking that is mandated by a government agency (or other governing body) for its contractors. The following criteria must be met:
- The device must transmit position reports every two minutes
- The position reports must be pushed into the third-party database (where they are automatically tracked by dispatchers)
Common uses for AFF devices are contractors flying for USDA during fire season and contractors flying for utility companies.

View Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Flight_Following

AGPS

Assisted GPS (abbreviated generally as A-GPS and less commonly as aGPS) is a system that is often able to significantly improve the startup performance, or time-to-first-fix (TTFF), of a GPS satellite-based positioning system. A-GPS is extensively used with GPS-capable cellular phones, as its development was accelerated by the U.S. FCC's 911 requirement to make cell phone location data available to emergency call dispatchers.

View Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS

AIS

The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is an automatic tracking system used on ships and by vessel traffic services (VTS) for identifying and locating vessels by electronically exchanging data with other nearby ships, AIS base stations, and satellites. When satellites are used to detect AIS signatures then the term Satellite-AIS (S-AIS) is used. AIS information supplements marine radar, which continues to be the primary method of collision avoidance for water transport.

View Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_System

ANT

ANT is a proprietary open access multicast wireless sensor network technology designed and marketed by ANT Wireless. It features a wireless communications protocol stack that enables semiconductor radios operating in the 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical allocation of the RF spectrum ("ISM band") to communicate by establishing standard rules for co-existence, data representation, signalling, authentication, and error detection.

View Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_%28network%29

API

Application programming interface, is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. The API specifies how software components should interact and APIs are used when programming graphical user interface (GUI) components.

View Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface

ASCII

Abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character-encoding scheme. Originally based on the English alphabet, it encodes 128 specified characters into 7-bit binary integers as shown by the ASCII chart on the right. The characters encoded are numbers 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, basic punctuation symbols, control codes that originated with Teletype machines, and a space. For example, lowercase j would become binary 1101010 and decimal 106. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, though they support many additional characters.

View Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

ASIC

An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) /ˈeɪsɪk/, is an integrated circuit (IC) customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use. For example, a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency Bitcoin miner is an ASIC. These are commonly used in satellite communications equipment for specialized RF or waveform modulation.

View Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit

Attenuation

Fixed signal loss due to cabling or reduction of signal strength due to atmospheric conditions.

View Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuation

AVL

Automatic Vehicle Location - SkyWave's agent with an embedded Lua application designed to reduce time and programming costs when integrating IsatData Pro satellite and satellite-cellular terminals into existing fleet management applications.

View Source: http://www.skywave.com/en/our-technology/applications/avl-agent