Ultra reveal new details on Global Observer JCTD
By Peter La Franchi , Correspondent
Sydney
The US Air Force (USAF) is this month commencing flight testing of a prototype wideband communications suite planned to equip an Aerovironment Global Observer endurance UAV under an ongoing joint concept technology demonstration led by the US Special Operations Command.
The flight trials programme will use the USAF’s Boeing 707 Paul Revere airborne networking test bed as a UAV surrogate ahead of Global Observer availability.
The communications suite is intended to provide a complete ‘switchboard’ capability at altitude over battlefield areas. A laboratory version has already undergone extensive testing says Thomas Lee, from Ultra Electronics ATS advanced programming concepts group, which is developing the payload in conjunction with the USAF’s 653 Electronics Systems Wing at Hanscom Air Force Base and the Global Cyberspace Integration Center at Langley Air Force Base.
Speaking 19 August at the International Data Link Symposium’s IDLS 2008 conference in Sydney, Australia, Lee said the development effort was seeking to take a ;simple UAS, small footprint UAS, and get everybody tied in to communicate with each other. As you know there are several different elements out there with different radios that have a hard time communicating with each other for various reasons. What we are trying to do is get everybody on the same page, not only with Link 16 but with voice, video, so that everybody has the same picture at the same time, all the way down to the war fighter’.
The Global Observer will carry ‘all types of leading edge communications’ says Lee.
He confirmed that the developmental suite uses common data link (CDL) to provide an internet protocol backbone: ‘What we are going to do is ride across the back of that and do control. Everybody understands that UAS are put up in the air today to provide video. We will take the video into the aircraft and send it down to the floor. What we are going to do is expand upon that, take Link 16 – now you have a beyond line of sight Link 16 communications using the small tactical terminal from ViaSat, to forward that radio frequency [signal] further down the pipe.
‘We take that one step further: With the CDL down on the floor with the leading edge war fighter, we can actually bring him the common operating picture – the same common operating picture that is produced at the air operations centre, [and by] the regional interface control officers and the tactical interface control officers. Where they provide all that information in a fuzed picture, we can push that via internet protocol all the way down to the leading edge. So now they have a situational awareness [picture] with video which provides them with some real good targeting information that is being passed back up to [support] aircraft…’
The individual war fighter is notionally a forward deployed special operations team member: ‘He has got eyes on target and he wants to communicate that back to headquarters, but there may be a line of sight issue, there may be a radio issue. What is nice about what we are doing here is that we can reach up and programme that radio here [in the Global Observer] to the type of radio that he is communicating with and patch that all together – so these two are now talking HAVEQUICK or whatever radio they want to use and bring all that back using voice over internet protocol using C4I technology across the internet protocol backbone and bring it back down onto the floor.
‘We can push that right into cell phone technology. We have brought in all the various types of technologies to be able to provide total communications all the way out to the leading edge.’
The suite can also handle Automatic Information System data can be fed through the system, again using the IP backbone, to provide maritime situational awareness.
Laboratory testing demonstrated that the approach operates ‘just great’ Lee told the conference. ‘What is going on in September…is we have actually got all this equipment that we have had running in the lab, we have it on the Paul Revere and it is going to be flying out of [the US navy’s] Patuxent River [base] for phase two. That is where we are today.’
Aerovironment are currently building a first full scale Global Observer UAS under a US$57 million contract to SOCOM which was awarded in September 2007. The contract also contains options for two additional aircraft taking its total potential value up to US$108 million: ‘They should be ready to start their flight production in 2010…This aircraft can fly at 60,000ft for a week. So what is really nice about that is that now you have a radio relay capability floating over the fight and it will stay up there for a week, then you just swap it out for another one once a week.’
Ultra ATS’s role on the project is via a standing services contract with 653 Wing.