EADS recently announced a contract win of up to EUR 1 billion from the Procurement Office in Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior. The BOS digital radio system for German security authorities and organizations will feature EADS as prime contractor, working together with Siemens to build a nationwide TETRA digital radio network by December 31, 2010. EADS Secure Networks within the Defence and Communications Systems (DCS) Business Unit bears the responsibility for the project within EADS.
All military technologies have their teething periods, and especially advanced examples often have longer ones. The SBX X-band radar offers a quantum leap in capabilities, and can even be floated into position in order to perform its missile-tracking function.
As our June 2005 article noted, the SBX was scheduled to arrive in Adak, Alaska by late December 2005. It remains at Hawaii, however, owing to a number of issues and glitches that have yet to be fully worked out. POGO offers a summary of those issues, via a link to a Chicago Tribune article an a leaked “For Official Use Only” document it was based upon entitled “SBX-1 Operational Suitability and Viability Assessment.”
Florida Atlantic University’s SeaTech – Institute for Ocean and Systems Engineering in Dania Beach, which is part of the College of Engineering and Computer Science, has been awarded a $2 million grant by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to investigate, design and build a prototype of a rapidly-deployable, multi-mission platform to be used as an enabling technology for seabasing.
This two-year project is headed by Dr. Frederick Driscoll of FAU’s Department of Ocean Engineering. Driscoll leads a team of researchers from FAU, two Navy laboratories and industry partners Oceaneering International and Marine Applied Physics Corporation. Since its inception in 1997, SeaTech has received 471 grant awards totaling more than $55 million.
