By John Rhea
SAN DIEGO — An attention-getting exhibit at the recent COTScon West conference and exhibition in San Diego was an operational AN/UYQ-70 network-centric command and control system with three sensor racks and the supporting displays and terminals.
The exhibit represented some $1.1 million worth of hardware, estimated Harvey Taipale, Q-70 business development manager from Lockheed Martin Tactical Defense Systems, St. Paul, Minn.
The system earlier last year had completed a series of tests using the U.S. Navy's sea-based laboratory, the USS Coronado, under a program sponsored by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) and the Program Executive Office for Expeditionary Warfare.
The Q-70, which was designed to accommodate a series of technology insertions, is "Son of NTDS [Naval Tactical Data System]," Taipale says, who worked on that program too when his organization was part of Sperry Rand Corp.
SPAWAR explains the networkcentric architecture of the Q-70 this way: unlike current networks that require an operating system and applications running locally on a desktop computer this architecture removes everything from the desktop except the resources needed for the human interface (keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc.).
What had run on the desktop system now runs on centralized servers. Thus the technology upgrades only have to be performed once on the system rather than at each desktop station.
The Navy estimates this should save at least 50 percent in maintenance, licensing, and local area network support costs.
