The Union Defence Ministry and Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) signed a contract worth over Rs 1,000 crore on February 8, 2021 for procurement of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) developed Software Defined Radio Tactical (SDR-Tac).
The Software Defined Radio Tactical (SDR-Tac) has been jointly designed and developed by Defence Electronics Applications Laboratory (DEAL) of DRDO through a consortium of domestic agencies and industry comprising BEL, Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR), Weapons and Electronics Systems Engineering Establishment (WESEE) and the Indian Navy.
The modern radio system will bring strategic depth to the Armed Forces, said Defence Ministry in an official statement. The delivery of the Software Defined Radio Tactical is expected to take place within three years.
Objective
BEL is already supplying SDR-Naval Combat (NC) and SDR-Air is under user evaluation trial. DRDO and BEL are mainly planning to provide latest SDR with security grading to the Indian Armed Forces.
What is SDR: Key Highlights
•The SDR-Tac is a four Channel Multi-mode, Multi Band, 19 Rack mountable, ship borne Software Defined Radio system.
•The system is intended to serve ship-to-ship, ship-to-air and ship-to-shore voice and data communication for network centric operations.
•The system houses multiple types of waveforms for narrow band and wide band applications and will support simultaneous operation of all the four channels covering V/UHF and L Band.
•The MANET waveforms are available in UHF and L-Band to support adhoc networking feature for net centric operations.
•The user evaluation trials covering exhaustive harbour phase and sea phase trials were completed successfully during May to June 2018 at Visakhapatnam for all waveforms including V/UHF and L-Band MANET waveforms under different network configurations.
•The interoperability trials were also successfully carried out with all other form factors covering Airborne SDR-AR on board Dornier Aircraft, SDR-Tac on board INS Kirch in sailing mode, SDR-Manpack and SDR-Handheld.
• The clearance for procurement was accorded after proper evaluation of all aspects by Navy's user agencies.
Significance |
| The SDRs will be backward compatible with existing Indian radios. They will allow use of common waveform/application implementation methods for different form factors. They will also allow implementation of futuristic waveforms on the same hardware using software programmability, thus ensuring longer life and savings on cost. The key factor of SDRs is that their software programmability allow easy changes of the radio's fundamental characteristics such as operating frequencies, bandwidths, modulation types, multiple access schemes, and channel coding/decoding methods, spreading/de-spreading techniques source and encryption/decryption algorithms. |
Background
The Defence Ministry said that Armed forces are in need of transition from the single purpose radio of the past to more flexible Software Defined Radios (SDRs) to serve most of their wireless communication needs.
Source: ANI
Comments
All Comments (0)
Join the conversation