ARLINGTON, Va. – U.S. military researchers needed to measure high-frequency (HF) radio waves to improve warfighter radio spectrum situational awareness. They found their solution from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio.
Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., announced a $15 million order to SwRI on Thursday for the Cancun program, which seeks to create distributable nodes to measure HF radio waves for improved warfighter situational awareness.
Measuring HF radio
Cancun seeks to develop distributable nodes to measure the high frequency (HF) radio environment for improved warfighter situational awareness in the HF radio band, which extends from 2 to 30 MHz and can achieve global coverage. HF also is referred to as shortwave.
SwRI won an original $38.9 million DARPA Cancun contract in June 2023 for the project's first phase, which sought to build 11 Cancun units and command-and-control networking hardware and software. Now SwRI moves on to Cancun phase two, which asks the company to build an additional fifty nodes with command-and-control network.
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The low size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) of these nodes will enable cost-effective wide-area deployments. The Cancun nodes will measure the state of the ionosphere using a sounding function, as well as record and relay portions of the HF radio band for analysis.
The primary challenge in Cancun is coordinating many Cancun units deployed over distances farther than 620 miles. Cancun will provide a command and control (C2) network and planning tools to address this challenge.
Communications latency
The C2 hardware solution may involve existing wired or wireless infrastructure. Communications latency will be an important parameter for this network. The mission planning tool will be developed with warfighter input to optimize functionality.
Technologies developed under the Cancun program will move over to the U.S. military services. For more information contact Southwest Research Institute online at www.swri.org, or DARPA at www.darpa.mil.
