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Contracts - Awards | Design Innovations | IT - Networks & Bandwidth | R&D - Contracted | Radars | Raytheon | USA

Elec Tricks II: $9.7M for Further Research

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AN/APG-77 Test Back in December 2005, “Elec Tricks: Turning AESA Radars Into Broadband Comlinks” covered some preliminary breakthroughs by Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, and discussed the implications. Their work involved using cutting-edge AESA radars as direct transmitters for secure, high-bandwidth communications, a move that could vastly increase the transmission and information-sharing capacity of planes like the F-15 C/SG (with the new APG-63v2/3 radar), F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet (APG-79), F-16 E/F Block 60 (APG-80), F-35 Lightning II (APG-81), and F-22 Raptor (APG-77). A follow-on article noted that one of DID’s readers had also done preliminary work in this area as a Ph.D. thesis, including some work that wrestled with the issues of long range transmission. It would appear that these investigations have now moved beyond the preliminary research stage. Contracts & Key Events June 13/07: Northrop Grumman Corp. and its teammates L-3 Communications, Inc. and Lockheed Martin Corp. have successfully conducted the first in-flight communication’s link with an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar. Using off-the-shelf, L-3 programmable modems and a new R-CDL waveform, the Radar Common Data Link (R-CDL) used the AESA radar’s fire control transmitter and antenna to perform high-data rate, two-way communications, streaming synthetic aperture radar map imagery […]

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