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But why worry about enemies understanding the radio? I can practically guarantee that the lower classification maintenance books that get "lost" already make it

by IX-103 5y ago

But why worry about enemies understanding the radio? I can practically guarantee that the lower classification maintenance books that get "lost" already make it to enemy hands. Plus if we use COTS then looking at anything but the encryption module would tell them little to nothing and allow them to use whatever existing civilian supply chains are available. Sure there's a time for LPI/LPJ, but short of a war with China I don't really see the need for most forces. Anywhere else we'd have air superiority and jammers are just loud, bright targets. If you have a LPI/LPJ module you just put in the radio when you need it then it's much easier to keep out of enemy hands. Then there is the cost of training for all the different radios. Yes, you could put one man or of a squad in training for 6 months ago he knows the basics about every radio there is. Or you could spend a couple weeks teaching everybody how to work a radio. Or you could have a real in depth training so you have a lot of fully qualified repair technicians. I'm not exactly sure what your talking about for the radio waveform fielded in the late 90s. That's too late for SINGCARS and too early for JTRS waveforms like SRW and WNW. The capability description seems a bit like SRW (though that is frequency hopped, not FM), which was one of the few limited "successes" that came out of JTRS (the design goals were 100x as many members of the network, 10x the range, 10x the backbone capacity, and the ability for software upgrades to make it compatible with any future radio).

Meph504 5y ago
I'm at the end of the day you really need to argue this with the military not me. as far as COTS parts, I mean if you think you can build a radio of that size with its requirements,life span,etc someone probably would have. they moved to slightly modded radios similar to law enforcement for squad level communications, but I dont see that happening for larger scale systems in the near future. But the field operation guide doesn't tell you how to open the radio, that is beyond operator (RTO) and field services. There were at least 11 builtin counter measures, to prevent someone from exploring the guts of the radio, and sure you could see what is in the radio, but once the eproms fried themselves, you would be hard pressed to figure out what was on them. The manuals that explain those enter workings aren't issued to field units, hence why they have maint. Centers. Not sure what you mean by too late for SINCGARS, the originals before the half sizes came out, I just as you could load the crypto and hopset from and ANCD, all you need to do was take a dog bone cable and splice and map the wires to a serial cable, and then configure telnet. Then set the proper broadcast mode on the radio. you could probably find the specifics in a leaked field manual :)

by IX-103 5y ago

Meph504 5y ago

I'm at the end of the day you really need to argue this with the military not me. as far as COTS parts, I mean if you think you can build a radio of that size with its requirements,life span,etc someone probably would have. they moved to slightly modded radios similar to law enforcement for squad level communications, but I dont see that happening for larger scale systems in the near future. But the field operation guide doesn't tell you how to open the radio, that is beyond operator (RTO) and field services. There were at least 11 builtin counter measures, to prevent someone from exploring the guts of the radio, and sure you could see what is in the radio, but once the eproms fried themselves, you would be hard pressed to figure out what was on them. The manuals that explain those enter workings aren't issued to field units, hence why they have maint. Centers. Not sure what you mean by too late for SINCGARS, the originals before the half sizes came out, I just as you could load the crypto and hopset from and ANCD, all you need to do was take a dog bone cable and splice and map the wires to a serial cable, and then configure telnet. Then set the proper broadcast mode on the radio. you could probably find the specifics in a leaked field manual :)