Posted by Courtney Howard
CARLSBAD, Calif., 22 Jan. 2010. ViaSat Inc. won a Limited Production (LP) order from the U.S. government valued at $14.4 million for Multifunctional Information Distribution System Joint Tactical Radio System (MIDS JTRS) terminals for F/A-18E/F and E-8C Joint STARS aircraft and spares. The LP award stems from a competitive procurement of 41 terminals through the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR).
The order is being awarded under the MIDS indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract initially executed in January 2000.
The MIDS JTRS program was implemented as a Pre-Planned Product Improvement (P3I) to the current MIDS Low Volume Terminal (MIDS-LVT). MIDS JTRS has completed contractor qualification testing and initial F/A-18E/F integration in anticipation of operational testing in 2010.
Pre-production terminals have been undergoing flight tests at Patuxent River Naval Air Station and China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station for several months. The terminal has completed security verification testing and is in the final stages of obtaining NSA certification, according to a company representative. ViaSat expects to receive conditional first article approval in February 2010.
MIDS JTRS is a joint development of ViaSat and Data Link Solutions and provides a migration path from the MIDS-LVT to a certified, reprogrammable, software-defined radio architecture for tactical data links. The MIDS JTRS adds three programmable channels to the legacy Link-16 and TACAN capabilities of the MIDS-LVT.
The three new channels are designed to host future advanced airborne networking waveforms. MIDS JTRS is "plug-and-play" backward compatible with MIDS-LVT so it can replace the MIDS-LVT, but remain interoperable.
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