DoD signs agreements for spectrum-monitoring systems
NewsDecember 22, 2017
CHANTILLY, Va. Engineering and IT firm Vencore Inc. announced that its research arm, Vencore Labs, has garnered agreements from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to design and field the Comprehensive Spectrum Monitoring System (COSMOS) and Spectrum Usage Measurement System (SUMS) programs.
Under the terms of the three-year COSMOS agreement -- which carries a value of $7.9 million -- Vencore Labs will design, prototype, and field-test a spectrum monitoring, recording, and visualization solution for use at DoD training ranges for the U.S. Navy. The Vencore Labs team is tasked with designing and implementing two types of programmable radio frequency (RF) sensors; the sensor data will be stored and analyzed to perform spectrum usage analytics and near-real-time centralized processing. The COSMOS team will also build application programming interfaces (APIs) that will exhange data with federal spectrum repositories and management systems. The company and the DoD envision that COSMOS will enable users to visualize actual spectrum utilization, more efficiently manage and schedule authorized spectrum usage, report on spectrum occupancy, and identify spectral anomalies.
The SUMS agreement -- valued at $6.8 million for a three-year period -- calls for Vencore Labs to design, prototype, and field-demonstrate a system to measure multiband RF spectrum usage used with airborne telemetry systems at DoD test ranges. The SUMS system will support DoD agencies -- including Naval Air Systems Command, U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Army -- that perform airborne and ground system testing and evaluation (T&E) at DoD test ranges to track, measure, and improve their usage of the telemetry spectrum. Vencore Labs officials believe that the SUMS system will enable agencies to improve their spectrum efficiency using insights gained from analysis and provide documentation for actual test-range spectrum usage against test plans.
