Defense expects to field new wideband radios to Army in early 2014
By
Bob Brewin
The Defense Department's Joint Tactical Radio System program office plans to kick off a procurement in February 2012 for new broadband radios to replace the multibillion-dollar Boeing Co. Ground Mobile Radio program that was terminated in October., Army Col. Gregory Fields told a press briefing Wednesday.
The Army expects to start fielding the new radios in the first quarter of fiscal 2014, he said.
Fields, JTRS GMR program manager, said the Army intends to acquire enough radios to equip eight brigade combat teams with 83 to 100 radios per brigade, or somewhere between 664 and 1,000 radios. The JTRS program was established in 1997 to manage development of a common family of ground, air and shipboard radios for all three services to replace tactical radios used by the three services.
He declined to provide a dollar value for the procurement, but on Oct. 19, Brig. Gen. Michael Williamson, JRTRS program executive officer, said the Army aimed to spend less than $150,000 per radio, which would put the initial value of the new contract at more than $150 million.
The Boeing contract runs through March, and by then Fields said he expected to receive security certification from the National Security Agency for Wideband Networking Waveform, which can transmit data point to point terrestrially at a rate of 2 megabits per second. Software waveforms replace the hardware in a radio that, among other things, controls bandwidth, frequency and modulation.
Wideband Networking Waveform uses the same modulation scheme -- orthogonal frequency division multiplexing -- as home and office Wi-Fi systems and is highly resistant to interference from other radios.
Unlike GMR, a decade-old development program backed by the Defense Department, the new radio project, which goes by the awkward title of Mid-Tier Networking Vehicular Radio, will seek commercial radios developed by industry that can run the Wideband Networking Waveform software owned by the government. Companies that plan to bid on the new radio project can draw that software from the JTRS library, saving both vendors and the government money, Fields said.
Fields said the JTRS program office also wants the new radio to incorporate the Soldier Radio Waveform, which handles voice transmissions, so it can communicate with handheld and backpack radios that also use that waveform.
The Army earlier this month tapped Harris Corp. to provide it with its AN/PRC-117G man-pack radio to equip maneuver brigades with broadband communications under a contract initially valued at $66 million. The service eventually will field the radios to eight brigades.
The Army is testing the Harris radio at its Network Integration Evaluation exercise at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, which started Oct. 31 and ends Nov. 19. So far, it has been well-received by the troops, according to an Army news release. "This radio sends critical information to soldiers when they need it the most," said Lt. Col. Troy Crosby, product manager for Army network systems that manage the Harris radios. "It provides the dismounted soldier with a means to relay information from the battlefield to a command post, in real-time."
Howard Lance, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Harris, said he views the $66 million contract for the AN/PRC-117G as a "milestone event in our effort to become the preferred wideband tactical communications provider to the U.S. Army."
In an Oct. 26 conference call with investors, Lance said the company's radios "clearly demonstrated the advanced capabilities of wideband networking in a challenging and real-world formal evaluation environment, receiving high marks in both their reliability and their ease-of-use," at an earlier Army network integration evaluation exercise this summer.
An earlier version of this story contained incorrect information about the estimated quantity and cost of the new radios. The information has been corrected and the story and headline have been clarified to make clear this is a joint-service program, not an Army program.