Handheld Comms
Written by ADAM BADDELEY
HOW LONG ANY MILITARY FORCE CAN PERFORM A GIVEN MISSION IS DRIVEN—IN LARGE PART—BY THE STRENGTH OF ITS COMMUNICATIONS. CHALLENGING REQUIREMENTS HAVE PRODUCED ROBUST RESULTS.
The DoD’s strategy to acquire handheld radios is through the Joint Tactical Radio System Initiative, through the Thales-led Special Radios domain and the General Dynamics C4 System JTRS Handheld Manpack Small Form fit (HMS) programs—formerly Cluster 2 and Cluster 5 respectively and more recently through the JTRS-approved solutions starting with the Harris AN/PRC-152.
A large number of requirements and programs to provide the mobility and capability of multiband handheld software-defined radios are currently in various stages of development across the services. In January, the USAF released a pre-solicitation for their intention to buy over 10,000 handheld radios with base stations, repeaters, and vehicle adapters. The Marine Corps is currently in the process of putting together Tactical Handheld Radio (THHR) requirements for handheld radios and handheld vehicular systems. The RFP is due out in early spring, but it is expected to be between $200-300 million and could possibly go higher. Funding for Army requirements for a multiband handheld is expected to be seen in the next supplemental, with funding expected to be $200 million. USSOCOM also has a requirement for further radios in this class but is putting together a systems approach for handheld, manpack and wideband soldier radios. The exact share is unclear for each at this stage.
OPTIONS
ITT’s Soldier Radio is an example of handheld technology reaching users. Larry Williams, director business development for ITT commented, “We are in the process of productionizing radios and they are being used by an increasing number of groups such as the Future Force Warrior community. There will be 45-50 Soldier Radios at next fall’s C4ISR On-the-Move Experimentation at Fort Dix in September 2007.”
The scenarios at Fort Dix are likely to see the Soldier Radio used for squad- and platoon-level operations with a tie back to a mounted component, either directly or through a UAV. In contrast to other experimentations at the event, the communication structure will be built around the Soldier Radio and SLICE 2.1-using Sidehats appliqué modules. SLICE is the development vehicle for the eventual SRW, and is the same version that will be used for the Future Combat System Spin Out 1 activities. The radio has also been used in largely contractor-focused FCS activities being integrated in ground vehicles and UAVs.
The U.S. has also been acquiring other handheld radios for urgent operational needs, covering short range UHF voice communications between individual soldiers. One of the most numerous handheld radios in service is Selex Communication’s Personal Role Radio (PRR), initially acquired by the USMC for use in OIF in 2003, after observing its combat effectiveness in Afghanistan. It was subsequently used by the Army, Air Force and the 75th Ranger Regiment.
For the majority of its PRR-class needs in Iraq and Afghanistan the Army opted for the Icom F43G. The Marines are now moving on and are acquiring 60,000 Integrated Intra Squad Radios for their next generation system in a $76 million contract awarded to Motorola in April 2006.
HMS
Joe Miller, director of JTRS programs, General Dynamics C4 Systems, sketched the handheld radio being acquired under the JTRS HMS program, the biggest single future provider of handheld radios to the U.S. military. “There are four handheld radios required; there is one-channel urban and maritime and a two-channel urban and maritime. The primary difference is the submersion requirements but other than that, performance-wise they are identical.” Under HMS, Thales and GD C4S are jointly responsible for the manufacture of handheld radios.
Both one- and two-channel handhelds have the same frequency operating requirement, namely 30 Mhz to 2.5 HGHz. The radio covers the full 30-512 Mhz, however, beyond that point the coverage is limited to military useful segments.
“It’s just a little early from a technology maturity perspective to put in the entire band.” Miller explained. “The radio covers the full spectrum; it’s whether or not you include the filters. The radio’s RF synthesizer actually runs down to 2 MHz to include high frequency (HF) but there is currently no space as the HF filters take up more size, weight and dissipate more power. It will run an HF waveform; it just won’t run it to specification.”
Investment in technology to overcome this is ongoing, with MEMS switches one of several areas being pursued. “The great thing about this approach and architecture is that you can incrementally add capability, as the technology is available. The design doesn’t really change but once the filters are there that provide higher levels of performance you can roll the design and add more filter into the board and it doesn’t change anything. That said, the first radio will meet the total mission needs. There is no requirement to act outside of the military bands right now.”
Miller outlined why extending the frequency coverage is important over time. “Frequency allocation and usage continues to change throughout the world, so depending on where you deploy, the available spectrum changes over time and you want to be able to adapt. That said, historically the military bands are fairly stable. The second reason is interoperability with commercial systems. Currently that isn’t an issue because most of the commercial based systems operate well below 1 GHz. What you are seeing now in the marketplace are commercial-based systems which are moving up into the higher bands, especially for commercial broadband, and at some point military radios will want to interoperate with those systems.”
The delivery of HMS Increment One has two phases. Handheld radios come in Phase 2, which is now in full development. GD C4S will deliver the first pre-EDMs for the first HMS hand held in mid- 2008. As Type 1 devices their hardware and software development is more extensive due to some extent on NSA clearances but largely due to the level of software functionality that is needed to support that level of security. Qualification testing for Phase 2 begins early 2009 and is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2009.
JEM IN THE ROUGH
The second JTRS program, the former Cluster 2 program, is based on the successful Thales AN/PRC-148 MultiBand Inter/Intra Team Radio (MBITR) of which more than 100,000 are in service. The resulting AN/PRC-148 JTRS Enhanced MultiBand Inter/Intra Team Radio (JEM) builds on the MBITR to create a JTRS-compliant radio; indeed the two share the same AN/PRC-148 designation.
Kenneth Leighton, Thales director of business development, responsible for special operations and USAF sales, described MBITR sales and support as ongoing, “[The MBITR] is the most widely distributed portable Type 1 multiband radio and there [are] other versions aside from Type 1 fielded domestically and internationally. Existing contracts are available, and we receive delivery orders for MBITRs against those contacts weekly and ship thousands per month. Thales intends to continue to support that product into the foreseeable future, however, on the domestic market front, we are transitioning as our customers decide that they would like to transition and support crypto modernization and the future proof aspects of the JEM version of the AN/PRC- 148.”
Orders for the JEM comprise two major wins; a USAF and Army contract for in excess of 1,000 and 5,000 radios respectively. “We are working with both customers to meet with their nearterm requirement and field accordingly,” Leighton said. “The last of the Air Force radios are due to complete delivery in mid-February. The Army intends to use the JEM to support brigade combat teams and Future Force capabilities and have not requested specific delivery time for their radios yet,” he continued. “We consider the initial order from Air Force the full rate production go-ahead.”
The DoD is treating the JEM as a new product with in-plant quality assurance representative, completing line proofing in early January 2007. Leighton said, “We are also in the 100 percent quality assurance inspection sign off. Which means that unlike MBITR, where we have the responsibility for quality assurance delegated to us by the government, they are still in effect approving every last JEM that is coming off the assembly line.”
Thales views the MBITR/JEM as a common production line. Right now roughly 25 percent of production is with the JEM, but this will change over time.
The difference between the MBITR and JEM are two internal cards and a new encryption chip. Thales offers a straight-forward upgrade for existing legacy MBITR radios to the JEM standard for in-service MBITRs and expect the services to pursue a formalized upgrade covering blocks of thousands of radios at a time.
Felix Boccadoro, Thales director of business development responsible for the Army and USMC, said, “We have not shipped any upgrade kits to date. The reason for that is that there are still large numbers of unfilled requirement for multi-band handheld radios. At this stage of the game even though we could ship upgrades, our DoD customers are for the most part focused on meeting deficiencies in number of radios.”
Leighton commented “With our USAF customer, the lead group of MBITR users has already begun discussions to upgrade their roughly 8,000 PRC-148 to JEM standard. They are not considering the availability of the JTRS HMS radios. They view the upgrade as a more near-term type of program, however, the dollars that they currently have are budgeted are really to address the significant shortfall of any type of Type 1 handheld radio.”
Speaking in January, Boccadoro explained that JEM would shortly enter operational service, with those in service being used now for training. He added, “As soon as personnel are trained up on them they will be deployed operationally.”
“In order to move forward with any of our program-of-record customers, we need approval through every step of the way, validation and testing,” Boccadoro said. “We have a very complex acquisition systems but it works. It produces the best radios in the world for our fighting forces, but we have to work within that. We don’t look at an advantage or opportunity to short-circuit that at the risk of any of our military.”
One of the advantages of the AN/PRC-148 approach is backward compatibility with the full suite of existing ancillaries. Boccadoro said, “One of the key strategies for us as customers transition from the legacy products [to] the JTRS SCA products is the retention of investment. It is assumed in the design of the v1/2 and v3/ that they must interoperate with these much more expensive parts of the systems such as vehicular base station and tactical repeater implementation.”
“Its not just about headsets and cables, there is large legacy investment and there is a need to move an entire system forward. It’s not just one portable radio versus the other. That’s not Thales’ focus; we have an overall strategy to move a system forward and provide JTRS compatibility and compliance in more than just a portable domain with a headset on it. That is where our strategy is very specific and provides significant amount of value for the customer.”
JTRS: AN ADOPTIVE FAMILY
Harris has received orders for 19,000 of its AN/PRC-152 radios of which 12,000 have been delivered. Developed commercially outside the JTRS program, the handheld multiband radio has recently achieved the milestone of joining the ranks of government- funded JTRS radios, becoming the most widely fielded JTRS radio to date.
“From the JTRS Joint Program Executive Office (JPEO) perspective, the AN/PRC-148 and the AN/PRC-152 are now considered JTRS-approved, a new term from JPEO. They are both considered equal,” said Andy Adams, vice president product line management at Harris RF Communications.
“The one difference [between the two radios] is the operational test [OT]. The AN/PRC-152 doesn’t have to go through the standard program milestones, so it doesn’t require an OT. We are in the process of working with the JPEO to actually perform an OT to check the box. That’s just us proving that we can do it, even though we have thousands of radios in-country today. Nothing hinges on the OT. We are JTRS approved as is.”
There is mainstream international acceptance of the radio, which in the summer received NATO Military Committee Approval, allowing it to be more easily acquired by NATO countries.
Harris is integrating a number of new features from across their product range into the AN/PRC-152. The company’s proprietary Advanced Networking Wideband Radio is being used to develop the ability to host future DoD waveforms in the AN/PRC- 152, such as the Soldier Radio Waveform, using a PRR-type radio under development, dubbed the RF-300U-HH Secure Personal Radio (SPR). “Our approach there is to develop the SPR that runs ANW2,” Adams said. “That is about a year off. Then we will take that technology and fold it back into the AN/PRC-152.”
“The SPR is our international radio. We are also developing a variant for the DoD market that has higher processing power, the ability to run the Soldier Radio Waveform, and the security architecture to support up to Type 1 level.”
In terms of MILSATCOM, a software-based DAMA IW capability will be added first to the Falcon III manpack and then to the AN/PRC-152, which Adams expects by mid-2008. Another feature is the company’s own Satellite TDMA Capability software, which allows more channels on a dedicated DAMA channel.
Adams explained, “With SDRs, we are getting to the PC model where you buy the hardware and then the software options. If they don’t need it, they don’t buy it. The processing in the AN/PRC-152 is more than enough.”
Encryption is an important area where the AN/PRC-152 is rapidly expanding. “We recently put AES encryption in the AN/PRC- 152 as a standard feature that shows the power of the software programmable crypto in the radio.”
Working with Etherstack Inc, Harris has developed an SCAcompliant version of APCO-P25 waveform, which provides land mobile interoperability in the U.S. market. “To our knowledge it is the only SCA-compliant APCO25 on the market. The initial version uses the Triple DES (Digital Encryption standard),” Adams said. “We are upgrading to the AES new standard in the fall, then we will upgrade to the Type-1 variant, which would be interoperable with the Motorola XTS 5000, probably next calendar year.”
Right now it is proprietary but Adams sees the potential to work with the PEO for that waveform to be licensed for wider use across the JTRS program.
The AN/PRC-152 has seen extensive use in Iraq. “Feedback so far has been extremely positive,” Adams said. “Testing by the Army at Fort Huachuca showed the range of the AN/VRC-110 [50W twin AN/PRC-152 vehicle mount] exceeded that of the standard SINCGARS fit. Feedback from users in Iraq is that they have ‘holes’ where standard systems won’t reach, but in which the AN/VRC-110 is able to communicate.”
Use of the AN/PRC-152’s multimode capability is beginning to be exploited using SATCOM OTM on a dedicated channel SATCOM.
The radio has a burst mode and can output up 10W in UHF SATCOM mode. Using an X blade antenna attached to a vehicle and the dedicated UHF antenna port on the AN/VRC-110. All they then have to do is change from the SINCGARS net into a MIL-STD 181B net and then are able to communicate from vehicle and reach back to headquarters.
Harris is developing a family of ancillaries with standard items such as base stations and repeaters. Adams continued, “One ancillary we believe is unique is an on-the-move SATCOM antenna which was released last fall. The antenna has a built-in amplifier that is powered by the radio, and with that antenna configuration, a soldier or person is able to walk around in theatre again the with MIL-STD-181B UHF MILSATCOM in a dismounted configuration.”
AURAL TX:RX
Radios connect to other radios. It is, however, ancillaries such as headphones and other devices that connect the information transmitted from the radio to the soldier carrying it. Silynx chief executive officer, Gil Limonchik, a former special operator himself said, “You may have very capable radios but in harsh battle environments, that counts for nothing without a good headset. People need to realize the radio and headset go hand in hand. In the past year or so there has been a renaissance in the field of headsets in the U.S., and not just in SOF and everyone is putting a lot of energy into rectifying this issue.”
Silynx has already sold several hundred of its QuietOps headsets to USSOCOM, which began deliveries in October and is now in service in Iraq. Its covert Stealth Ops headset, acquired several months earlier has also seen wider service in the GWOT. QuietOps and StealthOps are also in service with Canada, Israel, Italy, and the Netherlands.
“Our most exciting headset is the QuietOps, the first software defined headset in the world that also includes a PC programmer, which we will launch in March.”
QuietOps is a flexible tactical headset with hearing protection. From a common control box leaves it up to the user to select a headset based on their preferences for earplugs, earmuffs or covert or lightweight headsets. “There’s no other system in the world that can work with different headset,” said Limonchik.
“It’s also a smart system, he continues. “When QuietOps is connected, it knows which radio it is connected” to and it tweaks it to the radio’s characteristics controlling menus channels, volumes and groups.”
“We can already remote control the MBITR radio channels from the QuietOps with voice prompts noting the number of the channel (one, two, three, etc.) when the channels are being changed. In the heat of battle he doesn’t need to go to the right side of the rotary knob and count clicks. We give it to him with a voice prompt. With the PC programmer the user can also record a voice tag so instead of hearing a number they will hear a channel tag such as rescue net or fire support net.”
Silynx have also developed a Picatinny rail mounted wireless PTT for QuietOps, which also includes the facility to change the channels and volume level from a weapon.
Television Equipment Associates (TEA) takes advantage of its strong technical background to produce a variety of communication accessories, many with SOF applications. Their Bone Mic uses a non-exclusive, one size fits all ear-mold so that the bone MIC element is directly contacting the user’s jawbone. This technique protects the MIC from picking up airborne sound for optimum use in high noise applications.
Due to the ear mold shields, the MIC works well in very high ambient noise situations. Bill Pegler, TEA president shared a comment he received from an operator in Baghdad, “The clarity and volume of TEA’s bone mic headset is amazing. I now have to turn the volume down to less than 1/4 while riding at 70+mph with the windows down.” The company designed the system to function whether the wearer is in a nearly silent limousine or in the back of an open gun truck.
Pegler continued with the operator’s comments, “The Bone Mic headset is also much simpler to make quick changes from tac vest to concealed gear when doing close protection work indoors.” Simplicity and comfort were deliberately built into the design. Something Pegler pointed out was that chem/bio gear could be put on or taken off without interrupting communications.
Racal Acoustics new Raptor 17 was first seen in prototype form at the October 2006 AUSA show. Racal have sought to balance ergonomic with technology, shaping the headsets to a wide range of helmets to aid, reflecting their focus on dismounted combat. The earshells have been shaped to improve cheek to stock weld, minimizing weapon tilting.
The system has the facility to connect to vehicle intercoms and radio simultaneously, the latter via quick release connector for rapid dismount. A third input interface allows the headset to take to receive other sources of audio information without impairing protection or other audio performance.
The Raptor 17 allows has the facility to manage talk through sound levels according to circumstance allowing the user to attenuate or amplify those sounds they require during operations. Production is scheduled to begin in early 2008. ♦