HF to UHF Camouflaged Antenna

The highly dynamic and unpredictable nature of today's military missions and terrorist threats is a tremendous challenge and source of vulnerability for the modern SOF war fighter. Providing timely and accurate information to the war fighter isexacerbated by the ever-evolving landscape of signals, transmitters, and unique operational settings.The Windermere Group, a small business based in Maryland, has teamed with Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to develop an expandable, flexible, and innovative HF to UHF Camouflaged antenna and netting configuration.As such, our team will research, design, and build a prototype rugged, inexpensive, tactical antenna for deployed SOF personnel in three different HF to UHF Camouflaged versions:1. Tent Version2. Camouflage Netting Version3. Tent/Netting version with 100W HF transmitterA final report will be written detailing the preferred designs for both the Tent and Camouflaged Netting configurations, as well as providing the detailed results from the modeling and simulation efforts. Although this system is being initially developed for SOCOM applications, commercial applications are not difficult to foresee. The extensibility of the techniques developed in this effort to mobile communications and wireless personal area networking areapparent as these technology areas are rapidly expanding in the commercial market. Furthermore, Windermere's past work with local and federal law enforcement suggests several applications for their mission environment. Both commercial and governmentsystems have applications that would benefit from the infrastructure of a system incorporating the antennas required for their communications systems. Other military services would also have applications that could leverage these ideas, such as those thatemploy networked wireless systems.Windermere at present has commercial products, many of which have been the results of the commercialization of government development efforts. These efforts have provided other government agencies with products without incurring the expense ofdevelopment. Windermere has numerous military and law enforcement customers who have benefited from these commercialization efforts.