General Dynamics‘ [GD] Joint Tactical Radio Systems: Handheld, Manpack, Small Form Fit (JTRS HMS) is on track to connect soldiers by voice and data to a network and provide position location, a company official said.
“We’re on schedule, we are hitting all the milestones that are in our program plan…our schedule performance index is .98 right now, which is essentially on schedule,” Chris Brady, vice president of assured communications for General Dynamics C4 Systems, told sister publication Defense Daily in a recent interview.
The JTRS HMS cost plan was revised in 2007 and has been hitting the target since then, he said. At the end of the program, “we’ll be within about 10 percent of the original cost of the HMS program,” modulated by government revisions.
General Dynamics leads a team including BAE Systems, Rockwell Collins [COL], and Thales Communications, in providing the next generation hand-held radios.
The challenges are size, weight and power, Brady said. Consider the HMS Rifleman radio, which can be handheld and worn on the body, “that has on the order of 40 times the processing power of recent hand-held radios that have been deployed,” while sustaining the same size and weight. All that power in a small package is to enable it to build networks on its own to allow warfighters to stay in touch with the big network.
“What we’re all about in JTRS and HMAS is to bring the network to the warfighter without all that infrastructure because you don’t have that luxury,” Brady said.
The Army Evaluation Task Force (AETF) at Ft. Bliss, Texas, has been evaluating the Rifleman radio’s critical networked-communications abilities as part of a Limited User Test (LUT). AETF uses realistic scenarios in a variety of radio environments, examining how voice, data and position reporting aided situational awareness to improve network connectivity among warfighters and military units.
Once the LUT is completed, there will be a 120-day period as independent Army testers write their report, which will become “a vital exhibit” for the summer’s Milestone C for the program. A successful Milestone C review could allow the program to move into Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP), and for the government to place LRIP orders.
The first HMS radio the GD team is doing is the one channel Rifleman radio. But that radio allows multiple connections over that one channel.
For example, Brady said, “a leader in a group of warfighters could be monitoring two different talk groups and be listening to two different sets of conversations, even though they’re only on one radio frequency.”
“What we have the ability to do here is to create talk groups that may be independent of each other, though they may have a little bit of overlap so that you can say that certain team members are in one group, certain team members are in another group and when you talk you only address one group at a time, but you can listen to both if you are the leader or have a radio set up that way.
In addition to that, this is a radio that allows you to transmit data through it to other internet addresses as well, so you could be having voice conversations and also transmitting to and from a computer you might be carrying.
The HMS program in its entirety does have a couple of two channel form factors in our Phase II of the program, which is a little more than a year staggered from Phase 1, which is coming out with the Rifleman right now.
The Phase II has a Manpack, which is a two channel radio, and also a Leader Radio, a small form-factor, which also has also two independent RF radio channels that allows two completely waveforms to run at the same time.
As each soldier becomes a node on the network with his radio, he benefits while moving around in the environment. Moving in caves, tunnels or basements could isolate them from line-of-sight so they can’t hear or share data. However, the network automatically reconfigures itself to communicate to someone with a radio near a cave entrance, for example, which in turn can communicate with the entire network. It’s transparent to the soldier, who simply stays connected.
Feedback to the HMS office from Afghanistan and urban Iraq environments has stressed the importance of the ability to network.
For soldiers, the radio is easy to use.
“We certainly believe it’s about as simple as it can be,” Brady said. The radio does not have a display; it interacts with the user via voice prompts. This is by design. The intent is for the soldier to be always “heads up” and not looking down to operate a display.
The radio uses the Soldier Radio Waveform (SRW), an ad hoc networking waveform designed for battery powered dismounted units. The waveform is written by ITT [ITT], which April 1 released SRW 1.0C, which will be certified as secure by the National Security Agency.
“One of the reasons that we have type two NSA encryption is to deal with the fact that some of these radios will be distributed on the battlefield and may be recovered by adversaries,” Brady said. “In that regard it’s a form of encryption–non-cryptographic controlled items–so uncleared soldiers can carry them around, yet it is stronger and more carefully certified than commercial encryption.”
In another form, the radios will go into unattended sensors or eventually intelligent munitions that might be discovered on the battlefield.
“It’s a form of security where there’s an expectation that it could be discovered by adversaries but wouldn’t be a threat to higher classification data,” he said. Additionally, there is tamper protection that would cause the cryptography to be disabled if the radio is opened and someone tries to get into it.
Some of HMS radios are designed to draw power from other platforms. There are 13 different form factors, and many of those radios are designed to go into platforms that have their own batteries and draw power from that platform, Brady said.
“The intent is to take Rifleman radio and integrate it into the Ground Soldier Ensemble for the Army when it comes on line and we would have the ability to draw power from that,” he said.
The company continues to plan for future generations of the product. For the moment, the radio needs to be the size it is to support the general purpose processing resources necessary to run the waveforms and necessary to support changes in those waveforms, he said.
“I think it’s a never-ending activity for us and we’ll continue to drive more size and power out of the product,” Brady said.