Digital Battlespace 
AUSA Winter 2010: AMF JTRS ahead of schedule
Preproduction units of the Airborne, Maritime/Fixed Station (AMF) Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) are being delivered to US Army aviation units six months ahead of schedule to allow early integration work.
Speaking at the AUSA Winter exhibition in Fort Lauderdale on 25 February, Tony Gehr, Lockheed Martin’s technical director for JTRS, said the units would be delivered in August rather than January 2011 as originally planned.
Gehr said the company had also been awarded a $17.7 million contract option to deliver additional development units of the AMF-Small Airborne form factor for platform-specific testing of the AMF capability.
‘Previous live-fires we did were with earlier versions of the capability – pre CDR [critical design review] designs. But this summer will be the first official CDR-approved units going to the platforms for official integration,’ Gehr said.
‘We were originally on contract to deliver to army aviation in January 2011 and we have been able to meet early delivery and deliver more units. So our production is ramping up, so we will be able to get lots of units into the field as soon as it is tested and validated,’ Gehr said.
He said when you start to apply internet technology to airborne communications, with propagation over multiple links, information can be spread quicker and new applications can be introduced to the network.
‘It’s really about changing the dynamic to a networking capability. We don’t want the warfighter to have to think they have got to get on a certain frequency and have got to talk to this particular SINCGARS radio to relay a message,’ Gehr explained.
‘We want them to be able to run an application, whether it is chat, whether it is Voice over IP, just like they might do in a terrestrial infrastructure and know their message is going to get routed to the right person.’
With streaming video increasingly being shared between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), manned platforms and ground forces, provision is being made for the system to be capable of receiving video at 10 frames per second.
‘The pilot on the Apache is going to be able to get information to ground forces. They are going to be able to get an image from ground forces up to the Apache so he knows where to put weapons on a target.’
Gehr said the plan was to incorporate at least 28 waveforms into AMF JTRS over the lifetime of the programme.
The company has been developing AMF JTRS following the award of the system development and demonstration contract (also known as Increment One) in March 2008.
In October 2009 the programme passed its CDR. A Milestone C decision is expected in November 2011 with mass production and initial operational capability set for 2014.
By Tony Skinner, Fort Lauderdale
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