BAE SYSTEMS CNIR NORTH AMERICA BUILDS ON JTRS SUCCESS
20 Jul 04. Following on from its success as a partner in the winning General Dynamics-led Cluster 5 Team with partners Rockwell Collins and Thales, Jeffrey Markel, President of BAE’s Communications, Navigation, Identification & Reconnaissance (CNIR) segment gave BATTLESPACE an overview of the segments JTRS ambitions.
“We made a conscious effort to establish the company in the right technologies ten years ago to bid such high-tech projects such as JTRS, WIN-T and FCS, and our strategy has paid off”, Maarkel told BATTLESPACE.
“Overall turnover of CNIR has grown from $150m when GEC Marconi purchased the Hazeltine Company to $600m today, giving a growth of 20% per year employing 2600 people at four sites in Wayne N.J., Greenlawn, Long Island, Reston, VA and Spectral Solutions, Honolulu.
The Communication, Navigation, Identification and Reconnaissance Group, headquartered at Wayne, N.J., is a world leader in military communications, electronic identification, navigation, and guidance systems, for the U.S. and its allies. CNIR offers a broad technical expertise in C3 I systems and communications including transmission system integration; wideband networking radio systems; guidance and navigation; identification; and airborne ground-based software development.
CNIR has extensive expertise in electronic identification/combat ID, AEW display systems, electronic warfare, direction finding, signal processing, acoustic countermeasures, communication buoys, high-frequency sail arrays, and acoustic telemetry systems. It’s a pioneer in photographic airborne reconnaissance and electro-optic systems design, development, manufacture and integration. Systems include state-of-the-art airborne and ground system solutions for standoff and penetrating airborne reconnaissance.
The Boeing-led Cluster 1 team to supply manpack and vehicular radios, in which BAE is also a partner, will design and develop at least 100,000 radios under full rate production. The company in association with team mate Harris is currently undertaking LRIP 1&2 design and development, each designing half of the radio.
JTRS Cluster 1 is managed by the Army’s Program Manager for Tactical Radio Communications systems (PM TRCS), part of the Program Executive Office, Command, Control and Communications-Tactical (PEO-C3T) at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The Communications Electronics Command (CECOM) at Fort Monmouth is the contracting agency.
Cluster 1 will provide the warfighter with a multi-channel software programmable, hardware-configurable digital radio networking system. Cluster 1 supports requirements from the Army Aviation Rotary Wing, Air Force Tactical Control Party (TACP), and Army and USMC Ground Vehicular platforms.
Cluster 1 will meet Army ground requirements to continue Force digitization efforts, as well as TACP and airborne digitization efforts for the Army helicopter fleet. It meets Marine Corps requirements for its combat operations centers and mobile field users. The JTRS program will be a key enabler for the Army’s transformation to the Future Combat system (FCS) and Objective Force (OF).
In order to meet warfighter requirements and compress the production schedule, Cluster 1 combines JTRS hardware and waveform applications under a single contract. A contract for the System Development and Demonstration Phase of Cluster 1 was awarded to a Prime System Contractor, Boeing Space and Communications Unit, which selected a team of subcontractors to develop and build Cluster 1 radios.
Cluster 1 Radio Sets
Cluster 1 is developing two distinct radio systems: a Ground Vehicular JTR set (with a TACP variant), and an Airborne JTR set. These systems will interact using JTRS waveforms, including legacy waveforms and the Wideband Network Waveform (WNW). The Ground Vehicular JTR set will be scalable, to provide from one to six channels, and will include an embedded GPS receiver. The TACP JT