Lockheed Martin recently completed a five-week critical design review for the aircraft-, ship- and shore-based radios it will manufacture under the U.S. Joint Tactical Radio System program, clearing the way for preparations for a hardware demonstration by the end of the year, the company reported.

Representatives of the Defense Department’s Joint Program Executive Office for JTRS studied designs for the Airborne and Maritime/Fixed Station radios over the course of five weeks late last year. Lockheed received a letter from contracting officials notifying the company that it had passed the review.

The company also announced it has added five new waveforms — the term for a signal’s precise recipe of frequency and power — to the five waveforms currently written for the airborne and maritime radios. Ultimately, each AMF radio is supposed to be capable of communicating in a selection of nine waveforms out of a planned library of 28 reprogrammable waveforms.

With AMF JTRS, aircraft, ships, submarines and naval fixed sites would work as nodes: sharing and transmitting, voice, video and data with other Internet Protocol-based radios, such as those transmitting in the Wideband Networking Waveform and Soldier Radio Waveform, or non-IP-based networks such as Link 16.

“Say you’re operating in mountainous terrain,” said Mark Norris, Lockheed Martin’s AMF JTRS program director. “You’ve got Soldier A and Soldier B on opposite sides of a mountain, and they’re trying to communicate with line-of-sight radios, and you’ve got all these UH-60s, Predators, AC-130s, AH-64Ds flying around with AMF JTRS. You can use this Apache to relay the signal so that Soldier A can communicate with Soldier B through AMF JTRS.”

The next stage for Lockheed Martin engineers will be to prepare for an integrated hardware and software demonstration by the end of the year. This demonstration will challenge engineers to show that the AMF radios are stable and can operate with non-IP and IP-based links, Norris said.

The five waveforms that were recently added to the AMF lineup include legacy VHF/UHF line-of-sight waveforms to ensure that the new AMF radios are compatible with the existing radios the services will gradually phase out of service.

Mission planners would be able to select which waveforms they want to use and program the radios to transmit and receive in those waveforms. Because aircraft would be limited to carrying one or two AMF radios, the ability to reprogram the radios is extremely important, said Peter Baumann, a representative with Lockheed Martin’s AMF JTRS program.

“Since this system is software-based, we can add new waveforms as needed,” Norris said. “It’s just a matter of writing the software and installing it in the box on the aircraft or ship.”