The Army's costly quest for the perfect radio continues

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: March 10, 2018 at 8:23:22 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Army's costly quest for the perfect radio continues
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Mike Cheponis.  DLH]
>
> The Army’s costly quest for the perfect radio continues
> Video: The Army is still sticking to standards created by the much-derided JTRS program.
> By SEAN GALLAGHER
> Mar 8 2018
> <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/the-armys-costly-quest-for-the-perfect-radio-continues/>
>
> The decisions that the Department of Defense made about its "radios of the future" more than 20 years ago are still 
> having an impact on the communications gear the military services purchase today. The Joint Tactical Radio System 
> program may have ended, but it left behind a legacy that the US Army is now trying to get away from—while still 
> holding fast to parts of JTRS' framework.
>
> JTRS, as Ars reported in 2012, was DOD's quest to build the perfect set of communications gear based on 
> software-defined radio (SDR) technology. SDR was in its infancy in the mid-1990s, but the Joint Program Office JTRS 
> (the organization driving the DOD-wide program) was convinced that investing early would pay off with cheaper 
> hardware in the longterm, and the government-owned software (a sort of closed open source, with a library available 
> to all vendors) would prevent lock-in with a limited set of contractors.
> CORBA style
>
> JPEO JTRS is gone, but its software lives on. The Joint Tactical Networking Center(JTNC) has taken over management of 
> the Software Communications Architecture, the application framework and POSIX-based real-time operating system that 
> powers all the software-defined radios birthed from JTRS-descendant communications gear, along with libraries for the 
> various mission-specific "waveforms" used by different radios. SCA provides an interface for software to manipulate 
> the field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in radio hardware to reconfigure how they function. And until recently, 
> those interfaces required radio developers to use the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) to access 
> them.
>
> CORBA was introduced in the 1990s as an answer to cross-platform development woes; DOD required CORBA and C++ be used 
> in radio development because it wanted code portability. It didn't get it, partly because CORBA is complex and messy, 
> especially as it was implemented in SCA. And even if the code was easily portable between radios (which it is not), 
> changing radios from one waveform to another requires more than a software update—it requires a hardware swap-out in 
> most cases.
>
> In February, JTNC released SCA 4.1, a new iteration of SCA that finally drops CORBA. This could be good news for 
> future SCA-based projects in terms of software development costs. And the Army needs all the good news it can get 
> when it comes to communications.
>
> Distress signals
>
> Last September, Army officials announced that they were going to put the brakes on the Warfighter Information 
> Network-Tactical communications system, the communications gear that acts as the Army's battlefield network backbone, 
> after spending $6 billion so far on WIN-T's development. That did not go over well with Congress. But Army officials 
> are concerned that the system, which is largely based on 10-year-old software, is not resilient enough to deal with 
> jamming or even hacking by a technologically advanced adversary.
>
> Then there's the Army's Handheld Manpack and Small Form Fit (HMS) radio program. These radios, used in the field by 
> infantry, have been a headache for the Army for much of the last decade. Years behind schedule and way over budget, 
> HMS radios were pushed out without full testing, using a "low-rate" production to get them fielded for three years 
> before their contracts were even finally awarded.
>
> The smallest of them, the handheld Rifleman Radio, is supposed to be the infantryman's data link to the wider Army 
> network. The 5W radio uses JTRS' Soldier Radio Waveform, a digital communications format that works on UHF and L-band 
> frequencies. But SRW is only used by soldiers on the ground; to communicate back up the chain of command and with 
> supporting aircraft, the Rifleman Radio has to be relayed by a bigger Manpack (as in, backpack-sized) radio or by a 
> vehicle-mounted radio. (A program for vehicle-mounted radios, the Ground Mobile Radio, crashed and burned in 2012.) 
> And on a good day, under ideal conditions, the Rifleman Radio has a range of about 2km. And even with the Manpack 
> along as a router, there were significant problems. Manpack Radio garbled digital voice communications,particularly 
> when relaying to helicopters and other close air support.
>
> Both Rifleman Radio and Manpack Radio were identified as having major problems during testing in 2014. But the Army 
> had already started "low rate" (and by translation, higher cost) acquisition of the Rifleman and Manpack radios in 
> 2012 while evaluations were underway. That "low rate" ended up not being so low: more than 21,000 Rifleman Radios 
> were purchased before the contract for full production was awarded in 2015 because of the demand for radios for the 
> ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
>
> [snip]
>
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