The Battle Force Tactical Network (BFTN) is the only Allied/ Coalition option for providing HF beyond line-of-sight command and control (C2) in non-SATCOM or SATCOM-denied anti-access area-denied (A2AD) environments and serves as a primary backup for SIPRNET (Secure Internet Protocol Router Network) in the absence of satellite communications. Protecting this critical asset requires technological advances like MagiQs Spectrum Sentry (MSS) a single point orchestration engine capable of monitoring the entire HF spectrum while identifying, categorizing, and deploying agile countermeasures to suppress dynamic sources of interference. Modernizations to the BFTN system and waveforms (BRSE and RoCCE) will need significant improvements in dynamic range and interference immunity across the full HF band to manage emerging threats. MagiQ Technologies is well positioned to enable this, having delivered similar systems (Agile Interference Mitigation System AIMS) to the DOD, and has a top team of RF & signal processing experts who produce cutting edge interference mitigation solutions. MagiQ is well positioned to provide complementary cancellation hardware, algorithms and a high-dynamic-range HF digitizer (SPIRAL). MSS is architected to integrate these and/or third-party appliances into a unified system yielding significant improvements to SNR (>10dB) and dynamic range (20+dB) to make the worlds most reliable HF systems.
Benefit: The market for active interference mitigation across all RF bands is expected to grow dramatically over the next several years given growing trends of spectral crowding and increasing density of antennas on military and even commercial assets. MagiQ has developed an impressive set of active interference cancellation capabilities and related technologies. The MagiQ Spectrum Sentry (MSS) technology suite and algorithms are also applicable to VHF, UHF, and higher bands; in fact, many were originally developed at higher bands. At the heart of the MSS is the Orchestration Engine (OE), a unified interference management solution designed to orchestrate the actions of MagiQ and third-party countermeasures to achieve the best possible communications throughput at any frequency. Successful deployment would make a critical contribution to the DoDs spectrum dominance objectives in all RF bands. There are expected to be significant C4ISR systems deployments, and there are planned deployments of thousands of radio systems that could all benefit from variations of MagiQ Spectrum Sentry (MSS) technology. The inclusion of third-party companies will bring new ideas and technologies to the table. Together multiple specialists in this space should be able to achieve more than in separate disjoint efforts. MagiQs Agile Interference Mitigation System (AIMS) has progressed significantly since the initial shipments to the Navy in 2018. In 2018, AIMS drew a lot of attention as it was the first demonstration of cancelling hopping waveforms without a reference tap. Since then, a clear path has been demonstrated to halve the volume of the equipment. Most interestingly of all, MagiQ has increased the instantaneous 40dB cancellation bandwidth by a factor of ten, from 12MHz to 120MHz. Before the Navy was vulnerable in this band. Now it has the potential to harden the system and fully dominate this frequency space. In a separate development effort, the Interference Cancellation System (ICS) we are developing for SOCOM is designed to suppress local high-power jamming transmissions by over 70dB, allowing SOCOM radios to receive critical communications data. We are very excited about this technology because we see it as a stepping stone towards full-duplex communications. (Full-duplex involves the use of the same frequency for both transmission and reception at the same time). Although this is very challenging technically, there has been a lot of progress in the last decade as the capabilities of chips used digital signal processing techniques have expanded and RF chips have both improved and dropped in cost. The prize is large an approximate doubling in spectrum efficiency is expected, possibly more as it might tend to accelerate the trend toward smaller cells that we have seen the last two decades in the cell-phone sector. The cell-phone providers are very interested though so far they are mainly watching as the military has pushed the technology along.
Keywords: interference cancellation, interference cancellation, High ENOB, EMI, Electronic-attack, digital signal processing, Fiber Optic, jammer
