Shared Spectrum Co. (SSC) successfully demonstrated the company’s Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) technology, proving its capabilities on multiple hardware platforms in harsh military mobile radio environments.
The field demonstration, conducted at the Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in the Arizona desert, was the latest large-scale field test of SSC’s technology as part of the NeXt Generation (XG) radio program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The tests were witnessed by command and combat personnel from the US Army and the US Marine Corps looking for better ways to manage and access crowded radio spectrum resources.
To demonstrate the capabilities of the DSA technology on multiple hardware platforms, SSC installed the DSA software on fielded tactical radios from Thales Communications Inc. and Harris Corp. SSC also demonstrated the frequency agility and robustness of its technology using its multi-band DSA-2100 radio prototypes across several bands from 225 MHz to 3 GHz. The radios were used in a series of tests involving extreme electromagnetic environments alongside legacy radios, safely sharing the same frequencies. The evaluations showed how the equipment with SSC’s technology could automatically and rapidly move from one frequency to another without disrupting communications and evade unpredictable and harmful interference to or from other emitters.
“SSC is now in a position to work with the military services and our manufacturing partners to rapidly equip US troops with software-based upgrades that enable mission-critical communications while supporting their expanding need for more wireless bandwidth on the battlefield,” said Mark A. McHenry, SSC’s founder and CEO. “SSC is incredibly pleased to be a key part of DARPA’s swift transition of our dynamic spectrum access software from the R&D stage onto fielded tactical radios in a matter of months. These recent field test results are a clear validation that DSA can provide significant operational improvements to warfighters.”