News Briefs 

New Office: “We are establishing a new office in OSD called the Acquisition, Integration Interoperability Office, and our first task is to take a look at how are we going to integrate — truly get JADC2 talking across the department.  – Chris O’Donnell, deputy assistant secretary of defense for platform and weapon portfolio management in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (OUSD A&S). The new office will be led by David Tremper, Director of EW at OUSD A&S.

Among the industry news at AOC 2022 last week, Pacific Defense (El Segundo, CA) announced that its Spectranetix subsidiary signed a contract with the Marine Corps Systems Command to provide the company's SX-3000 CMOSS Mounted Form Factor system for the MAGTF Electronic Warfare Ground Family of Systems (MEGFoS) static site system evaluation effort. According to the company, "The SX-3000 consists of a chassis, power supply, network switch, assured position, navigation and/or timing card, single board computer, and TSM mobile ad-hoc networking and communications card. The system is based on a 7-slot chassis that support up to two additional mission specific payload cards, such as SDR, DSP, and/or GPU processing card in a typical payload card configuration. Spectranetix or third-party software and firmware applications are installed on the payload processing cards to meet specific mission requirements."

Also announced during the show, RADX Technologies (Palo Alto, CA) introduced the Trifecta-GPU Family of COTS PXIe/CPCIe GPU Modules. According to the company, Trifecta-GPUs are the first COTS products that bring the extreme to compute acceleration and ease-of-programming of NVIDIA® RTX® A2000 Embedded GPUs to PXIe/CPCIe platforms for modular Test and Measurement and EW applications.

TEVET (Greenville, TN) announced that it is introducing the Liberty KA and Liberty KP software defined instruments real-time spectrum analyzers in partnership with Keysight Technologies. The Liberty KA and Liberty KP offers 1 GHz of bandwidth per channel on up to 16 independent or synchronous channels.

In other industry news, Northrop Grumman received a $21.6 million contract from DARPA to develop and demonstrate the next generation of scalable HEL sources under its Modular Efficient Laser Technology (MELT) program. Overall, the MELT program aims to exploit technologies such as novel semiconductor fabrication techniques, coherent beam combining, photonic integration, and three-dimensional integration and packaging.

Mercury Systems said that its new mPOD electromagnetic attack (EA) training system has successfully completed flight testing. Tactical Air Support installed the mPOD on its F-5 aircraft and demonstrated the system's ability to break, deny and delay radar locks from opposing fighters, as well as creating multiple false targets on their radars. "Our close working relationship with Mercury has resulted in a state of the art, internally configured EA capability fully integrated with our open architecture sensor suite," said RC Thompson, CEO of Tactical Air Support in a joint press release. "The result is threat realism with no performance penalty on our aircraft."

Program Executive Officer, Land Systems (PEO LS) Program Manager, Ground Based Air Defense (PM GBAD) at Marine Corps Base Quantico, VA, will hold an Industry Day to discuss PM GBAD’s upcoming requirement for the MADIS Effector. According to the announcement, this effort "will be accomplished through the integration of command and control software with emerging and existing components integrated onto the Marine Corps’ Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTV) Heavy Guns Carrier (HGC) Variant. These vehicles, complimentary in capability, are the Mk1, which includes a counter FW/RW aircraft and non-kinetic C-UAS capability, and the Mk2, which includes a detection, kinetic, and non-kinetic C-UAS capability. PM GBAD intends to acquire solutions from vendors that are capable of providing a Group 1 and 2, with potential for 3, C-UAS defeat capability via an effector. The effector would increase the range of C-UAS defeat capability to augment the current defeat mechanisms. The solution will be required to operate with the Mk2 JLTV given current requirement constraints. The effector will need to be a pre-existing field tested or demonstrated prototype, and must be able to utilize the existing RPS-62 radar for initial track guidance." The point of contact is Sarah Faulconer, e-mail sarah.faulconer@usmc.mil. 

Applied Signals Intelligence Inc. (Sterling, VA) received a $4 million contract from the Air Force Research Lab's Sensors Directorate, Multispectral Sensing and Detection Division, for research in support of its "Framework and Applications for Direction-finding at the Edge (FADE)" effort. According to the contract announcement, the company will supply its Crosswinds ultrawideband precision DF system housed in a Stongback pod configuration.

Teledyne Technologies (Thousand Oaks, CA) announced it has entered into an agreement to buy ETM-Electromatic, Inc. (Newark, NJ). ETM has decades of experience in developing and manufacturing high-power amplifiers for radar, EW and SATCOM applications. In a press release announcing the deal, Teledyne said, "ETM strengthens our capabilities in microwave combining technologies and high-power gallium nitride (GaN) based solid state power amplifiers."