Senior Airman Yurina Zamora, 222nd Communications Maintenance Squadron radio frequency technician for the Global Hawk, aligns an ultra high frequency satellite communication antenna at Beale Air Force Base, Calif., Aug. 13, 2013. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Allen Pollard/Released)

WASHINGTON: Northrop Grumman now will get a chance to flight test its software-defined satellite communications radio, the latest step in the Air Force Research Laboratory’s race toward capabilities that underpin the Pentagon’s Joint All Domain Command and Control initiative.

The demonstration project is designed to show that the defense prime’s Freedom radio can work with modems provided by other vendors and easily communicate with current military SATCOM networks as well as future satellite constellations, according to AFRL and company officials. The JADC2 effort is at the core of the Defense Department’s overarching effort to refocus how it would fight future globalized, information-dependent, all-domain wars with Russia or China — embodied in the Joint Warfighting Concept.

“We anticipate that many of the communication services being tested will be procured via the Space Force Commercial SATCOM Office as their pending solicitations result in service contracts. The Freedom Radio, and hardware solutions like it, will be available for integration onto many platforms by the respective programs of record,” Brian Beal, of AFRL’s Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation office, elaborated in an email to Breaking Defense.

AFRL on Nov. 17 exercised a contract option for the flight test under an original December 2019 contract with Northrop worth $13.68 million, Beal said. Under that expanded scope of work, the firm “will be incorporating third-party satellite communications modems into the Freedom radio and interconnecting with two different phased array antennas from different vendors. The system will first undergo ground testing and then proceed to a flight test.”

The Freedom radio provides “open architecture, platform agnostic, cyber-secure solutions to support a wide range of integrated communications and networking mission functions across domains,” Northrop Grumman explained in a Nov. 17 press release.

“Through this Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) contract, we will be able to mature an open architecture, SATCOM-enabled Freedom Radio solution designed to help create a truly interconnected JADC2 network architecture across air, land, sea and space,” said Jenna Paukstis, vice president of communications solutions at Northrop Grumman. “Our SATCOM-enabled Freedom Radio will allow warfighters to quickly gather and share information from space assets to help them make more informed decisions via an interconnected JADC2 network.”

As a next step in the AFRL project the company will be conducting a proof-of-concept demonstration later this year, Beal confirmed.

“This demonstration will be blending third-party vendor technologies into Northrop Grumman’s core open architectures to support the rapid capability investments made by the DoD to support JADC2 efforts,” the Northrop release said.