"John Keeney" wrote

"Paul F Austin" wrote ...

"Thomas Schoene" wrote
Paul F Austin wrote:

When I first looked at F-35, it seemed a looong step backward in
terms of situational awareness, with virtually no rear-quadrant
visibility. DAS promises to fix that. If it works for F-35 then it
should work for UCAVs.

The bandwidth issue is still a real concern. That's a lot of data to
transmit via long-range RF signal, and there's already lots of
competition
for the spectrum. What's possible to do by wire or fiber inside the
aircraft may not be practical via radio to a remote operator.

TCDL provides 200Kbps downlink/10Mbps uplink service. That's adequate
for
this kind of situatuational awareness. More downlink would allow more
raw

For how many nodes/UCAVs at once?

One for each TCDL link. What's your point?


data but in this case, the fusion of the six DAS thermal cameras occurs
on-board and only the FOV in the direction the user's HMS is pointed at
need
be downlinked. CDL provides uplink services at various rates from T1 up
to
256Mbps but that's overkill. CDL also lacks the total system capacity
that
would be required. Today. The USAF is busy expanding the satellite comm
network capacity in anticipation of increased traffic.



One part of the USAF's data network roadmap is to place switching nodes in
many aircraft, including tankers and MC2A to provide both the aggregate BW
and number of available links. There're complementary programs to increase
COMSAT capacity by using -less than MILSTAR- robust satellites and
transponders.

The data network roadmap is progressing "under the RADAR" because it gets a
lot less publicity than to Things That Go Fast And Explode but is IMO more
important.