Raytheon demos Army's SRW airborne and ground radios
NewsOctober 31, 2012
MARLBOROUGH, Mass. Raytheon engineers demonstrated the Soldier Radio Waveform (SRW) on ground and airborne radio terminals, enabling warfighters to communicate over disparate networks.
As part of demonstration, operators were able to transmit voice and data traffic back and forth between Raytheon's terminal and another radio running SRW. For waveform conformance Raytheon officials are working through the Department of Defense's (DoD’s) Joint Tactical Networking Center's (JTNC) certification process. Company officials say Raytheon plans to participate at upcoming government interoperability tests.
The Raytheon radios already use the Next Generation Mobile Ad Hoc Networking Waveform (NMW), which is specifically designed to run on reduced size, lower cost, and lower power radios.
The company’s airborne radios are used on helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The ground radio system -- dubbed Mobile Ad Hoc Interoperability Network Gateway (MAINGATE) -- is targeted for the U.S. Army mid-tier network, for which it is under evaluation at the 2012 Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) at Fort Bliss, Texas. MAINGATE, with NMW, has been used by deployed forces for more than two years.
The latest radios can run narrowband and networking waveforms as well as the future Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) waveform from the JTNC library. Raytheon delivered its NMW into this same repository to ease interoperability with MAINGATE.
