The U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command, Fort Monmouth, NJ recently issued a pair of contracts to Federal Prison Industries Inc. and UNICOR for the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS) and associated items. Federal Prison Industries Inc. is also known as UNICOR, but different terms were used on each release. The contracts were worth a total of $113.9M.
Since the U.S. discovered during WWII that HF radio (3 – 30 MHz) can skip around the Earth allowing eavesdropping, the main military tactical radio band is the VHF Low band of 30 to 88 MHz. Another problem with conventional single channel radios is they can be located by direction finding. SINCGARS is the primary Combat Net Radio (CNR) for the US Army, designed primarily for voice command and control for the infantry, armor, and artillery units. It is a VHF-FM radio system that operates on any or all of the 2,320 frequencies between 30 and 87.975 MHz in 25 kHz increments. It provides the primary means of command, control and communications (C3) for Infantry, Armor and Artillery Units, solving the basic problems of tactical radios and providing a family of radios for soldiers, vehicles, and aircraft.
SINCGARS is designed on a modular basis to achieve maximum commonality among the various ground and airborne system configurations. The Portable manpack version is called the PRC-119. All the other versions are either Airborne or Vehicle (land or water), and their designations begin with the appropriate letter. A common Receiver Transmitter (RT) is used in the manpack and all vehicular configurations. Capable of transmitting voice and analog or digital data up to 16 kbps, SINCGARS employs frequency-hopping and electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM) to minimize vulnerability to enemy electronic warfare and provides secure communications with an integrated communications security (ICOM) device. It is consistent with NATO interoperability requirements, and replaced AN/PRC-77 and AN/VRC-12 series radios.
Federal Prison Industries Inc. in Washington, DC, received a $97.4 million firm-fixed-price contract (W15P7T-05-F-0073) for procurement of SINCGARS, EPLRS, and FHMUX Iks and associated ancillary items. Work will be performed in Danbury, CT (42%), Edgefield, SC (1%), Fairton, NJ (1%), Lexington, KY (3%), Lompac, CA (1%), Loretto, PA (1%), Memphis, TN (42%), and Phoenix, AZ (8%), and is expected to be complete by Feb. 28, 2007. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. There were an unknown number of bids solicited via the World Wide Web on June 27, 2005, and one bid was received.
UNICOR in Washington, DC (a.k.a. Federal Prison Industries) also received a delivery order amount of $16.5 million as part of a $334.2 million firm-fixed-price contract for Spare Parts for the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS). Work on this contract will be performed in Lexington, KY (56%), Phoenix, AZ (28%), Loretto, PA (8%), Otisville, NY (4%), Fairton, NJ (3%), and Lompoc, CA (1%), and is expected to be complete by May 20, 2013. This was a sole source contract initiated on May 20, 1996 (DAAB07-98-D-R013).
Note that the SINCGARS mean time between failures (MTBF) is about 5,000 hours, more than 10 times better than the VRC-12 & PC-77 radios it replaced. The systems include Built In Test (BIT) to help determine which module needs to be replaced.
* FAS Military Analysis Network – Single Channel Ground And Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS)
* Jerry Proc – SINCGARS: SINgle Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System