Understanding the use of DWORD

[lardoso]

Hello, I am a newbe in the use of VB
My goal is to read a data streaming from a machine...
the streaming is divided in tre main parts,
the first is a 10 byte array that declare the length of the second and third part.
The second one, the header, is a 22 DWORD (*32bit) ( 88 byte ) structured of mixed data types.
I can easly read the value inside this header when the DWORD contains just one information using something like:

        For counter = 0 To 21
            For i = 0 To 3
                vettore_appoggio(i) = data(10 + i + counter * 4)
            Next i
            header(counter) = System.BitConverter.ToUInt32(vettore_appoggio, 0)
        Next counter

My problem starts because some of these DWORD contains several indipendent informations, for example
DWORD #4 [ channel 2 peaks 31..16] [channel 1 peaks 15..0].
For what I understood the first 16 bits ( so 2 bytes) are used to store the information of the first channel , while the second 16 bits are used for the second channel, I tryed converting the first 2 byte with
System.BitConverter.ToUInt16()
but without success.
Can someone explain me what to do and how these numbers are supposed to be stored?

Thank you so much.