CURTAINS FOR "JITTERS"?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: November 10, 2005 12:26:10 AM EST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] CURTAINS FOR "JITTERS"?
Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com

CURTAINS FOR "JITTERS"?

<http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001929.html>

The idea was simple: take the military's tangled mess of radios, any  
replace 'em all with a single, software-based model.

But executing the idea has been anything but easy. And now, generals  
are talking about dropping the notion of a universal radio  
altogether, Defense News' Greg Grant reports -- right when Pentagon  
chiefs are trying to decide what to do with about the troubled, $6.8  
billion Joint Tactical Radio System.

Essentially, the JTRS program [known as "Jitters"] is aiming for  
something that’s almost physically impossible, or at least extremely  
expensive, experts say... The desire to use a single antenna for many  
different wavelengths bumps up against laws of physics, which make it  
difficult to pull in strong signals across the spectrum. An amplifier  
that works across the whole spectrum will use much more electrical  
power than one tuned for a specific frequency band. Waveforms and  
transmissions that are speedily handled by analog systems, such as  
the widely used Link-16, are much tougher to achieve with digital  
computation...

[snip]
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>


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