BAE SYSTEMS team wins British programmable digital radio contract

An international team led by BAE SYSTEMS has won Phase 2 of the United Kingdom's Programmable Digital Radio (PDR) project to reduce the costly and time-consuming testing and implementation work currently needed to write software for PDRs, which are expected to enter military service shortly.

QinetiQ (formerly known as DERA) selected the BAB SYSTEMS team to develop new automated design techniques for the programming of PDRs, a field in which the company has 12 years of experience.

The BAE SYSTEMS team includes Communication, Navigation & Identification (CNI), at Wayne, New Jersey, and USA Communications & Defence Infrastructure (CDI), based in Christchurch, United Kingdom. Other contributors include Raytheon's Radios/Terminals facility in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA, and Rohde & Schwarz, based in Munich, Germany.

Development of a Waveform Description Language (WDL) to be used to describe precisely a communication waveform, began during Phase 1 and will be completed in the early stages of this contract. The WDL, ultimately to be released as an open specification and compatible with commercial interfaces, will support the creation of a largely automated design process for generating PDR code.

The final stage of the development will be a series of system demonstrations, to be conducted at BAE SYSTEMS Christchurch. These will prove the effectiveness of the automated design process using two different communication waveforms and two types of PDRs. Included in this demonstration are a tactical radio developed in the USA and the SATURN waveform used by NATO.

More than 40 military waveforms have been developed by a wide variety of suppliers for specific purposes and/or missions, and for specific communication hardware. Waveform applications include voice, data, satellite, anti-jam, air-to-air, and ground-to-ground, each with provision for tight security. Hardware hosts can be as simple as hand-held radios or as complex as radio rooms onboard aircraft carriers.

Recent advances in digital circuitry have made PDRs practical, stimulating their development for commercial and military use, thereby allowing a variety of communications waveforms to be embodied in a single radio.

At present, the design or definition of a waveform is a complex and exacting task, with design automation support to simplify the task being generally unavailable.

Following this project, the designer of the communication waveform will use the new WDL to precisely define its functionality, aided by editing software to eliminate errors by detecting inconsistencies. This WDL description will be fed into a special software package on a design support workstation to automatically generate the implementation code for the selected PDR.

An initial version of this special software package, called an Interpreter, will also be developed under the contract with QinetiQ, analogous to the compilers used for programming languages such as Ada, Fortran, or Cobol. As a result, the cost of the exhaustive testing which is now commonplace should be dramatically reduced.

QinetiQ has been a proponent of the PDR concept for several years, first demonstrated as part of the Future, Modular, Multi-band, Multi-mode Tactical Radio (FM3TR) project, which has entered Phase 2 and is also being supported by this new initiative.

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