Contract increases scope of JTRS Step 2B
Rockville, MD—Thales Communications, formerly Racal Communications, has been awarded a contract change by the Joint Tactical Radio System Joint Program Office to increase the scope of its existing JTRS Step 2B contract.
The JTRS program, representing all branches of the U.S. military, is establishing a standard for future U.S. military tactical radios. The standard will also have commercial applicability, and will allow for greater interoperability with more hardware and software commonality among radio systems.
Thales’ current contract implements the JTRS standard software communications architecture in a small, lightweight, battery powered tactical radio for the ground-forces domain. The radio prototype uses a general-purpose processor operating on a POSIX- compliant operating system and digital signal processors running reprogrammable software to implement the radio functionality.
The contract change implements an open standard, commercial DSP operating environment that allows the programming to be performed in a high-level language, improving programming efficiency and allowing more software portability. This approach brings advantages to waveform development and supports the JTRS vision of software portability between hardware platforms.
