Boeing [BA] delivered the first two engineering development models (EDM) of the Joint Tactical Radio System Ground Mobile Radios (JTRS GMR) to the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) program on Feb. 27.
FCS will use the EDM units for software development, integration and testing. Combined with earlier pre-EDM radios, the EDM units will provide mobile networking capability during this summer’s FCS Spin Out Limited User Test at Fort Bliss, Texas.
“We almost do a parallel program with FCS. We support their development with our program while it’s in development,” Ralph Moslener, Boeing JTRS GMR program manager, said in a teleconference yesterday. “We don’t wait until GMR has been fully tested and certified before we give it to FCS. They literally get it in parallel with us as we are maturing the GMR program.”
The FCS office is about a block and a half away so it gets the same hardware right off the production line and as the JTRS GMR increases in capability, “we are able to just walk down the street and update the radios they are using.”
Army Col. Daniel Hughes, program manager, JTRS Ground Domain, said in a separate statement, “When fielded, JTRS GMR will allow warfighters to communicate and share information over a secure, interoperable tactical radio system.”
JTRS software-programmable radios are the newest military radio being developed in different configurations for the services and will provide voice, video and data communication.
The GMR program now has most of its development behind it.
“We are now entering the formal testing stage. We’ve just kicked off the production qualification tests, and we will be going through those through the end of the calendar year,” Moslener said.
The company will be verifying that the radios meet the requirements, the formal testing, such as environmental and performance testing EDMs and the latest versions of the operational software and the waveform software as it is integrated. Integration will be done with the hardware and with the waveforms.
The Wideband Networking Waveform (WNW) is about 80-plus percent complete, he said. “It’s being developed actually on the target GRM hardware and is probably the only device that will allow you to take full advantage of all of the capabilities of the Wideband Networking Waveform.”
The WNW work left to complete is to bring integration to a close and do the formal testing, Moslener said.
The program continues on the plan approved by the Joint Program Executive Office (JPEO) for JTRS. The GMR deliveries to FCS are on schedule, testing on plan and scheduled for completion in December. More tests will be done in 2010, followed by the Milestone C presentation in October.
“We’ll have gone through all of the security certifications with the NSA and everything will be complete at that time,” Moslener said.
An approval at Milestone C would kick off low-rate initial production. Then there will likely be a production competition in 2011-2012 as the units are implemented in FCS and decisions made on how much of the GMR capability will be introduced into the legacy force.
While JTRS has its critics, Moslener said the new radios are worth it.
“We have a tremendous number of requirements. They approach 40,000 requirements that we have to meet,” he said. “We’re the only platform that can meet the requirements that have been established.”
While WNW is in the JPEO’s repository where others have access to it, Moslener said the waveform is being developed on the GMR, which has in excess of 20 processors.
“Anybody who’s doing things with it [WNW] do it as some subset, maybe 20-25 percent of the total capability and want people to believe they’re meeting the full capability,” he said.
Looking at the projected prices, based on the program’s experience with EDMs and looking at the multiple configurations the government could order, whether they are two, three or four channels, the cost profiles are pretty competitive, he said.”I would tell you that we were able to deliver this capability, depending on the variations, between $50 and $100,000 depending on what the government wanted, which is very different from the numbers people are passing around.”
“When GMR is in production, it’s at quantity production. It’s not one or two handmade units, so it’s coming down in price and it’s much more affordable than in development. It meets all of the requirements that have been established, the way the people who defined the program have intended, which means multi-channel operation,” he said.
“It’s still a real value proposition for the government and we’re so far along in the game. We’re in formal testing. There are no technological breakthroughs that we need,” Moslener said.