Digital Direction Finding (DF) System for the Next Generation Submarine Electronic Warfare (EW)

The focus of this Phase II SBIR topic is to improve the electronic warfare (EW) and direction finding (DF) capability for submarines to meet the future Combatant Commands (COCOMs) Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) requirements.All COCOMs have identified EW and ISR improvements, to support Force Application and Battlespace Awareness, as one of their highest priorities. For submarines to meet the future COCOM ISR requirements they will need to improve the Direction Finding (DF) capability in the imaging mast. The proposed solutions to improve submarine DF must conform to open standards and approaches in the hardware and software design that readily support technological and functional advancement of the systems capabilities. DF is critical to improved situational awareness, ISR mission effectiveness, and overall ship safe operations particularly in the littoral operating regions.Our design will provide a small SWAP scalable DF solution that allows the tuners and DF processing to all be housed in the imaging mast and provides low bandwidth DF results as a data product.