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06 Feb 12. Northrop Grumman Corporation is participating in U.S. Fleet Forces Command’s Joint/Coalition Amphibious Exercise Bold Alligator 2012, employing the company’s BAC1-11 test aircraft to provide F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) sensor capabilities. During Bold Alligator 2012, the BAC1-11 is being configured with the F-35’s AN/APG-81 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar and the AN/AAQ-37 infrared distributed aperture system (DAS). Systems will operate with future software blocks undergoing test as well as those delivered in current F-35 jets. Bold Alligator is a large-scale, multinational Navy-Marine Corps amphibious exercise conducted by U.S. Fleet Forces and Marine Forces Command. It will be the Atlantic Fleet’s largest amphibious exercise in 10 years. The 2012 exercise is centralizing planning and execution of a brigade-sized amphibious assault from a seabase in a medium threat environment. Following a decade of ground war, this event is intended to revitalize, refine and strengthen core amphibious competencies of the Navy and Marine Corps. “With JSF being delivered to training commands in 2012, the Navy-Marine Corps team is poised to start using our radar and DAS in an operational context, much like U.S. Pacific Command did during Northern Edge 2011. Northrop Grumman’s commitment to deliver new capabilities to the war fighter remains a priority. This exercise is another opportunity to demonstrate operational utility to the fleet,” said Jeff Leavitt, Northrop Grumman’s vice president of Combat Avionics Systems. “F-35 sensor capabilities are unprecedented. Their performance continues to meet or exceed expectations.”
08 Feb 12. Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. announced the Ensemble® Series 6U OpenVPX™ HCD6210 rugged compute blade based on the Freescale® T4240 QorIQ™ AMP Power Architecture®. Utilizing two of the new Freescale T4240 QorIQ AMP processors, the HCD6210 blade has a total of 24 cores/48 threads, each core with an AltiVec® single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) engine for high-performance signal processing support. Systems based on the HCD6210 can scale from 1 to 16 boards, enabling new levels of subsystem performance in radar, EO/IR and EW applications. (Source: Yahoo!/BUSINESS WIRE)
09 Feb 12. Raytheon Company is tripling the satellite capacity for all AN/ARC-231 airborne radio terminals at no cost to the end-user. The enhancement is provided by an upgrade to Integrated Waveform (IW) software, following successful field tests hosted by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). Prior to the software upgrade, this form of radio communications had limited capacity, causing communication delays in theater. The government’s prior acceptance of the Phase 1 IW upgrade for its ARC-231 radios enabled Raytheon to implement this important Satellite Communication (SATCOM) enhancement, available to all U.S. Army Aviation aircraft and various U.S. Air Force aircraft. The present Ultra High Frequency (UHF) satellite system is reaching the end of its lifecycle. In order to bridge the gap between the current system and the replacement system, which is the MUOS satellite constellation (Mobile User Objective System), the Defense Information Systems Agency has worked with Raytheon and other radio vendors in the development and rapid fielding of IW as the UHF SATCOM solution. The ARC-231 radio participated successfully in numerous field operational test events hosted by DISA. As a result of these test events, along with extensive regression testing conducted by the Joint Interoperability Test Command, the ARC-231 radio received approval through the Joint Chiefs of Staff Office for the IW software fielding within the Department of Defense. Raytheon has since incorporated this upgrade into its current production radio. New production radios as well as the more than 5,000 cur