Boeing

Boeing [NYSE: BA] has completed a successful Delta Preliminary Design Review of its Airborne Maritime/Fixed Station Joint Tactical Radio System (AMF JTRS) program. The review, attended by more than 100 industry and government officials, took place in Anaheim, Calif., in mid-October.

The review measured the program's progress on development specifications, system design, architecture, key component technologies and risk reduction. The results confirmed that Boeing has met the government's updated requirements and is ready to proceed to the System Design and Development phase of the program.

"Our solution resolves key risk reduction issues and advances the system design and architecture requirements," said Leo Conboy, Boeing AMF JTRS program manager. "We've paved the way forward with a tremendous amount of technical progress."

Boeing's AMF JTRS team displayed mockups of their hardware design and demonstrated prototype radios running both legacy voice communications and the Wideband Networking Waveform (WNW), which enables Internet-like capabilities. Demonstrations ranged from design and development to manufacturing capacity and planning, supply chain management and Interactive Electronic Technical Manual capabilities.

The team provided a multi-node networking demonstration using virtual and hardware-based radios. The lab-based demonstrations also featured the WNW and Boeing's Heterogeneous Networking capability with legacy and low latency edge networking using Rockwell's Tactical Targeting Networking Technologies.

Boeing and its best-of-industry teammates -- BBN Technologies, Harris, L-3 Communications, Milcom Systems Corporation, Northrop Grumman and Rockwell Collins -- have supported the pre-system development and demonstration phase since 2004. The U.S. Air Force is expected to award the design and development phase contract in early 2007.

Boeing's AMF JTRS communications system will provide secure, software-defined radios that feature Internet-like capabilities, allowing warfighters to communicate with one another in a network-centric environment in the air, on land and at sea. The system will bring secure networking to the battlespace, including the transmission and receipt of real-time text and voice information, as well as the ability to stream live audio and video, share maps, conduct networked meetings and use Voice over Internet Protocol.