BEDFORD SIGNALS CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: A214-002

Description

The Army is seeking solutions to provide prototype Same Frequency (SF) Simultaneous Transmit and Receive (STAR) Tactical Radios based on Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) Software Defined Radios (SDR's). Systems should suppress in-channel, external (enemy) interference – while operating SF-STAR at the same time. The objectives are 5 Watts transmission power with 120 dB TX/RX isolation, a unit cost of $2k, and a MANET protocol operating over a variable bandwidth and tunable carrier. Bedford Signals has developed substantial intellectual property to leverage towards solving this problem – including low latency fast converging digital HDL cancellers, a fast converging high suppression analog canceller control algorithm, a novel low loss high linearity Vector Modulator (VM) architecture, and a custom mesh radio implementation. Our approach is to combine a compact antenna array with an analog self-interference canceller, a cascaded digital self-interference canceller integrated with an anti-jam canceller, and our mesh radio protocol with media access control and physical layers modified to be a surrogate stand-in for an existing military waveform. This approach will not only lead to a low cost high performance prototype radio, but will also facilitate transition into existing tactical radios.