SPAWAR team seeks ways to replace two-way radios that can’t communicate

The U.S. military has about 750,000 two-way radios and a lot of them can’t talk to each other. It’s a problem that’s vexed military people for years.

The answer may lie in a project at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, Charleston, or SPAWAR. Engineers embarked on research last month that could pump an estimated $5 million to $10 million a year into the local economy during each of the next 10 years.

“We can’t repeal the laws of physics,” said Navy Capt. Ron Crowell, “but we’re going to develop a single radio that, with the software we will create, will perform the same function as many different radios.”

Crowell is head of the Space and Naval Warfare center’s Communications Department. He and David Smoak, an electrical engineer and deputy program manager, know the difficulties ahead.

“We have voice radios, data radios, and fax radios,” Crowell said. “We have radios on aircraft, on ships and on submarines. We have special radios for SEALs (the Navy’s special operations sailors).”

In fact, the Navy has more than 200 different types of radios, with hundreds of thousands of individual units. The wide range of frequencies these radios use, together with other technical considerations, have blocked previous attempts to make them fully compatible with each other.

For example, the relatively low-frequency radios that provide long-range communications need longer antennas than higher-frequency systems. Higher frequency radios that use relatively small antennas lack range.

Those problems can’t be solved without changing the laws of physics, Crowell said, but the problems can be isolated by using interchangeable antennae of varying sizes. The radios themselves can all be the same if engineers at the SPAWAR center and two other Defense Department sites can develop new software to go along with other high-tech devices.

He said the SPAWAR center in Charleston has teamed up with the SPAWAR center in San Diego and the Army’s Joint Interoperability Test Center in Arizona to develop the new radios, known as the Joint Tactical Radio System. Locally, the SPAWAR center has a considerable amount of lab space dedicated to the project. Private contractors in the Charleston area’s high-tech sector can expect to see action beginning next year.

“No timeline on contracts has been set yet,” Crowell said. “The timeline will emerge next year. Actual contracts will come later.”

Smoak said that once the new radios become available – probably around 2004 – virtually everyone in the military who uses a radio would want one.

“There are military vehicles running around out there carrying stacks of radios,” he said. “Those radios take up a lot of space and weight. We hope to reduce all that for all of the armed forces, including the Coast Guard and our special ops people.”

According to Crowell, the project “has the potential of recasting how the Department of Defense and the private sector think in regards to how radio sets are designed and will operate. And at the same time make them as small as possible.”

The radios won’t be built in the Charleston area, but the software and other engineering work needed to develop them can be created here.

The estimated annual expenditures of $5 million to $10 million “is very conservative,” Crowell said.