11 Mar 04. Northrop Grumman Corporation will help the U.S. Air Force enhance the surveillance capabilities of aerial vehicles by embedding antennas in the primary load-bearing structures of composite aircraft wings. The new approach could lead to antennas as large as the surface area of a wing with enough sensitivity to simultaneously detect ground-moving targets through dense foliage and track air-to-air missile threats. Northrop Grumman and the Air Force Research Laboratory will share the costs of maturing the antenna integration technology under a five-year, $12m effort called the Low-Band Structural Array (LOBSTAR) program. The effort could benefit unmanned aerial reconnaissance systems such as the Air Force’s Global Hawk, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Joint Unmanned Combat Air System, and the Air Force Research Laboratory’s future Sensor Craft concept.
06 Mar 04. Raytheon showed BATTLESPACE its new MicroLight radio during AUSA. The MicroLight uses technology from the Raytheon offering for the JTRS Cluster X requirement. It is built using COTS cellphone components and can carry the different waveforms required by Cluster X. The radio is particularly suited for urban operations where satellite systems are notoriously unreliable. As Tim Strobel of Raytheon told BATTLESPAE, satcom requires the user to be in a static position, in urban scenarios and night fighting you must keep on the move.” The radio runs at an impressive 486Kbts and has an embedded satcom router. The satcom router enables soldiers to be guided to the required position by a voice activated router. Strobel said that the added value of the Comtech satcom system written about in our February issue by Scott Gourley at AFCEA enabled the EPLRS line of sight system to bridge gaps between forces enabling marine Combat teams in the Iraq to communicate as much as 150 miles apart.
01 Mar 04. Honeywell and Synopsys, Inc. have signed an agreement to jointly develop a design infrastructure to support the creation of leading-edge radiation-hardened and radiation-tolerant Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs).