AEROSPACE DEFENCE GOVERNMENT

COMINT

Channelization of RF signals is used to extract narrowband signals from
a wideband source. Our channelization solutions offer high flexibility and
performance.

AEROSPACE DEFENCE GOVERNMENT

COMINT

Channelization of RF signals is used to extract narrowband signals from a wideband source. Our channelization solutions offer high flexibility and performance.

Understanding our COMINT offer

Knowing or not knowing your opponents’ strength, location, capabilities, condition and intentions has always been one of the decisive factors between failure and success in the battlefield.

Network centric warfare has accelerated the speed of military operations allowing fast and accurate use of joint firepower with smart weapons. Knowing the strength and location of own and opposing forces has become vital for all military operations.

Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) is a key concept in network centric warfare and describes means for gathering and sharing information between connected assets such as ships, aircraft, ground stations, vehicles and personnel.

Electronic Warfare (EW), Electronic Support Measures (ESM) and Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) are major stakeholders in providing the required information and situational awareness to enable success in the modern battlefield.

COMINT Capabilities

On a high level a modern COMINT system provides two main capabilities:

Tactical, near real-time, situational awareness by providing meta data and geographical information from intercepted transmissions and emitters. This includes interception data views and a map view that represents own assets in combination with interception LOBs and geolocated emitters in the area.

Strategic, long term, intelligence by providing captured, demodulated (and decoded) radio transmissions for intelligence analysis. This includes everything from replaying and analyzing signal recordings to geolocated emitters and network analysis functions.

It’s good to notice that these capabilities overlap in many aspects and are available simultaneously for the operators.

Capability description

The capabilities of a modern COMINT system can be divided into four main categories: Signal acquisition, processing, recording and reporting.

Signal acquisition contains the phases where radio transmissions are detected and successfully captured using high gain antennas, appropriate RF conditioning and highly sensitive NCR multichannel receivers. Our solution utilizes a fast scanning receiver to constantly look for new transmissions from selected frequency ranges in combination with a number of hand-off receivers that offer narrowband channels for signal extraction and demodulation. The amount of required hand-off receivers depends on customer requirements for instantaneous bandwidth.

Processing happens at multiple levels throughout the entire system. It starts at NCR multichannel receivers where the received radio signals are channelized up to thousands of individual radio channels for further processing. Later processing steps include signal identification/classification, demodulation, decoding, speech detection, speaker identification etc. depending on signal type and defined processing chain. The purpose of the signal processing is to produce relevant information from the radio transmissions.

Our solution provides a number of standard signal processing modules, such as demodulators, and a framework where custom modules can be implemented or integrated. Sensor’s tasking function utilizes the processing modules and receiver channels to extract valuable information from the received signals.

Recording provides tools for storing the received signals and their meta data for later processing and analysis. Our solution provides flexible and powerful tools for signal recording and replay. The entire receiver processing band can be recorded, when required, for later processing and analysis. This can be a very powerful feature when dealing with previously unidentified wideband signals. Getting a good quality recording is the first step in the process of learning and understanding previously unknown signals.

Channelized signals can be stored to circular buffers of configured duration to enable seamless rolling history for received data. In other use cases the system can be setup to for example detect speech and only record when relevant content is detected. Extensive signal recording tools provide a very valuable asset for longer term COMINT analysis work.

Reporting

The sensor system reports the processed information in the form of interceptions. Interceptions are the result of intercepting radio transmissions and they typically contain meta data such as frequency combined with the content such as recorded audio or produced data. Part of interception are also the LOBs and in case of networked sensors also calculated positions for the emitters.

In addition to interceptions the sensor also constantly reports it’s location and status. Sensor’s own location is typically retrieved from an integrated GPS subsystem.

Download our brochures for more information:

• Hugin 200 Multichannel Receiver
• Hugin 2000 Multichannel Receiver
• SANDRA

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