With another year coming to a close, The Modern Battlespace team takes this time to reflect back on lessons learned and important insights shared across the defense community that contribute to the progress of the battlespace as we know it. An important focus for the defense community this year is software defined radios (SDRs), pointing towards an overarching trend of modularity and open systems on the battlefield.
Here are a few compelling thoughts from different experts about SDRs and their growing role in the military:
Software Defined Radio Market is Rapidly Growing
A report released earlier this year titled “Market Analysis and Insights: Global Software Defined Radio (SDR) for Communication Market” indicated marked growth in the SDR market over the next five years. According to the press release, “The global Software Defined Radio (SDR) for Communication market Growth is anticipated to rise at a considerable rate during the forecast period, between 2020 and 2026. In 2020, the market was growing at a steady rate and with the rising adoption of strategies by key players, the market is expected to rise over the projected horizon.”
Software Defined Radios Help Power In-Theater Agility
In a recently published byline on The Modern Battlespace, Dr. Sungill Kim, Director of Product Management and Strategic Partnerships at TrellisWare Technologies explained how SDRs fit into the modern strategy for combatting peer and near-peer threats.
“SDRs also have the unique ability to support technology insertion to combat emerging threats,” he wrote. “The U.S. military must prepare for near-peer threats with sophisticated electronic warfare (EW) capabilities. New resilient waveforms such as Warrior Robust Enhanced Networking Narrowband (WREN NB), or novel interference mitigation algorithms, can all be ported to existing SDRs. This flexibility and adaptability cannot be achieved with ASIC-based radio architectures.”
Dean Handrinos, co-founder and partner at Triad RF Systems, echoed that sentiment in a recent article on Military Aerospace, stating, “An engineer now has the ability to design a radio capable of generating many different signal types and modulations, without having to design a system from scratch.” The more robust adoption of SDRs continues to stretch budget dollars further and get modern comms solutions in the hands of warfighters more quickly.
Software Defined Radios Align with the Evolving Multi-Domain Battlespace
In a podcast with Ryan Bunge, Vice President and General Manager of Communications, Navigation and Guidance at Collins Aerospace, The Modern Battlespace learned more about the evolving battlespace as warfighters learn to work across multiple domains. During the conversation, Bunge highlighted the tools that enable the connectivity and the situational awareness needed on the modern battlefield, SDRs among them. “We’ve been introducing software defined radios and data link solutions that can be integrated into multiple domains and are modernized with the latest crypto and waveforms, to provide crucial connectivity on the battlefield.”
