UAVs to provide hard to reach communications

Rifleman Radio offers combat lifeline

Army strives to deliver connectivity in hard-to-reach locations with mesh networking

• By David Perera
• Apr 02, 2009

The first Rifleman Radios are scheduled to roll off the assembly line this July in a low rate of initial production, said executives at General Dynamics, the contractor building the radio.

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Radio connectivity on the fly

The Rifleman is a single-channel, handheld radio that transmits the next-generation tactical waveform on a mesh network, part of the Joint Tactical Radio System program’s Handheld Manpack Small (HMS) domain. The radio underwent testing in November 2008 by the Army Evaluation Task Force at Fort Bliss, Texas, and is set for a limited user test this month at the same location, JTRS program officials said.

The testing revealed a need for improvements to network scalability and in push-to-talk responsiveness, said Joe Miller, director of JTRS programs at General Dynamics C4 Systems, the overall JTRS HMS prime contractor. The primary response from soldiers was positive, he said.

Weighing about 2.5 pounds and with an anticipated life of five years, the radios are expected to become part of the Army's Ground Soldier Ensemble and also probably be mounted on unmanned aerial systems to boost the radio’s range. The radios should reach initial operating capacity by summer 2011, program officials said.

By themselves, the radios have a range of about 5 kilometers, Miller said. However, they are designed to network individual radios into a mesh. That means that one Rifleman-equipped soldier would be able to reach another soldier located outside of immediate antennae range because the connection would hop through nodes along the mesh. The radio has the Soldier Radio Waveform, which converts signals into digitized packets. Throughput should be 600 kilobits/sec, according to the JTRS program executive office.