Affordable Stabilized Directional Antennas for Small Platforms

The Navy operates hundreds of thousands of sensors and datalinks across unattended surface and undersea buoys, surface, undersea, and air vehicles manned and unmanned, and man-portable nodes.Ā Most of these use low-gain omnidirectional RF antennas for sensing or communications, and these antennas must radiate in all directions to ensure sensor coverage and data links are maintained regardless of positioning or movement.Ā Furthermore, during high sea states (4+), swells exceed the height of the antenna so no LOS to an airborne asset is possible the majority of the time, so most transmissions are never received. Higher-gain directional antennas provide improved range and LPD/LPI, but must be pointed towards their targets, and high-speed, high-reliability aiming is required.Ā Separately, to detect valley transitions and swell peaks, an on-board sensor must be used to ensure data is only transmitted at the proper times.Ā No commercial product exists that transforms position-navigation-timing data of inertial measurement units, GNSS resources, and position sensor and correction factors into an automated ōantenna independentö set of electronic beam steering controls.Ā This opportunity is to create an integrated module with PNT-ACU capability at low SWaP-C. IXI develops C5ISR and multi-band sensor and effector products with a focus on counter-UAS and SIGINT systems and signal processing techniques. OSU develops broadband compact antenna arrays and control subsystems. NuWaves is a manufacturer of sonobuoy radio hardware and Lockheed Martin is a prime sonobuoy developer, manufacturer, and system integrator for the U.S. Navy.Ā This team has the end-to-end experience to integrate COTS PNT sensor components with low-power processing to generate antenna control unit commands for an upgraded phased array antenna for enhanced range, LPD/LPI, and datalink reliability.Ā By Phase II Base effort end, prototype automated antenna control units will be integrated with a sonobuoy radio float with TRL 6 open water test results in enhanced sea states with demonstrated and quantified performance enhancement.Ā By Phase II Option end, most of TRL 7 system integration will have been completed and prototypes will be ready for fleet event (system of systems) testing.