RF-over-Fiber Links for the JTRS GMR

The Joint Tactical Radio System, Ground Mobile Radios (JTRS GMR) enables two revolutions: (1) Wide-area tactical communications; (2) Survivability of C3 assets. Prototype hardware that triggers these revolutions is delivered under this project. A radio and its antenna have been necessarily collocated since their invention more than 100 years ago. The length of radio-antenna connections is limited by Ohmic loss in the coaxial cable and this limitation gets rapidly worse as the operating frequency increases. The short radio-antenna distance creates two limitations that are ingrained in tactical communications doctrine: (1) Tactical communication links are truncated by obstructions and terrain, while Beyond-Line-of-Sight (BLOS) links require satellite communications (SATCOM) equipment. (2) Survivability of a modern command center is degraded by its antennas, which declare"Here I am!"to everyone with eyeballs or direction finding (DF) equipment. The JTRS JPEO has an opportunity to radically revise these two limitations by extending the existing GMR system with new RF-over-fiber technology. The proposed effort develops RF-over-fiber links for the GMR system and delivers two sets of prototype hardware. The anticipated result is two simultaneous doctrinal revolutions in wide-area communications and survivability.