By Ann Roosevelt
ITT [ITT] Electronic Systems announced its Communications Systems business area today delivers its 500,000th Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS) to the Army.
SINCGARS provides secure VHF voice and data communications capability to tactical units across the Army and is the most prolific tactical radio system in the world. Additionally, SINCGARS is used by by 34 countries.
ITT has developed, manufactured and supported six generations of continually improved SINCGARS radios since the first radio was delivered in 1988.
“It’s actually about half of the size today as it originally was. It’s half the size, half the weight. It’s a digital radio today,” said Allen Boyd, vice president of tactical communications business part of ITT Communications Systems, part of ITT Electronics Systems.
Last year, ITT won a sizable competitive award for the last batch of SINCGARS radios to flesh out the Army’s procurement strategy of 581,000 radios. That radio will be changed even more inside, he said.
“We teamed with Thales to bring the best of what they had in their software defined radio supporting the JTRS enterprise with the best of our circuitry in SINCGARS,” Boyd said.
Since then, the company has delivered enhanced software-defined functionality, enabling SINCGARS to meet emerging battlefield demands. Recent new technology upgrades have included the development of a UHF radio appliqué to operate the wideband networking Soldier Radio Waveform (SRW) and the development of radio-based combat identification (RBCI), a software upgrade to help prevent fratricide among U.S. and allied forces.
For example, Boyd said, ITT had a novel idea: since the company developed the SRW, and the Army had already bought and paid for a number of the radios and infrastructure–“it would be interesting if we could run SRW in an appliqué, bolt on, fashion.” Thus, the applique fits within the SINCGARS footprint and is “low-cost and high-reliability.”
ITT has no intention of competing with the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), he said, but wants to complement the wideband networking JTRS brings “down to places in the battlespace that need to come into net, otherwise be disadvantaged,” Boyd said.
In recent years, the company met increased Army production requirements during its wartime surge, increasing deliveries from 1,000 to more than 6,000 radios per month while also delivering more than 25,000 ancillary devices each month to support the radios.
“ITT is proud of the trust placed in us by the U.S. Army and allied forces to deliver the world’s most successful and capable tactical radio,” said ITT Electronic Systems President Chris Bernhardt. “It is a tremendous responsibility to support this large and robust installed base of SINCGARS radios. We will work to continue to provide the technology upgrades to meet our Army customer requirements.”
ITT also has developed a military GPS receiver on a circuit card that does not add any more volume to the radio and is invisible to the user. This has ancillary advantages, such as the ability to spread the GPS system out to subsystems, such as sensors or weapons on a platform that need location or precision timing. GPS is necessary, for example, to Patriot missile batteries.
“We understand the Army intends to retain a sizable number of SINCGARS radios for another 20 years or more,” so we want as modernized and complementary a radio as possible that is compatible with the emerging JTRS, Boyd said.
ITT continues to evolve SINCGARS capabilities. For example, the company is working on a networking on the move capability, Boyd said. It is also looking at fostering miniaturization and how to achieve reductions in size, weight and power.