Page 58 - Australian Defence Magazine June 2021

56 LAND FORCES C4 EDGE
JUNE 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
back of this. Some of those relationships, certainly from Penten’s perspective, are now starting to get things done and will last well beyond this program.
“But I’d also say that the approach that EOS have tak- en has been light touch, which is a great thing. It’s really been about herding the cats to get the best out of the cats. EOS has not been prescriptive, but has pulled together the different elements of Australian industry and has worked with each of the organisations to try and find a path to deliver their best and show their best to Army with that particular mission requirement in mind.”
Wilson is also enthusiastic about the future prospects the program has highlighted, not just for Penten but all the partners.
“They (opportunities) seem to be coming thick and fast and I think one of the things that we’ve tapped into is this realisation that there is a pretty significant market for non- ITAR and non-Type 1 encumbered radio communications technology,” Wilson explained.
“It isn’t just about North America. It’s about a global need for a raft of communication modernisation opportu- nities that are built around some really significant changes taking place in the commercial satcom market and also in the commercial radio communications market. It’s about how to try and leverage those opportunities for defence forces around the world, but don’t have the muscle that someone like the US can put forward.
“At the end of the day Australia is a middle power. A lot of our allies look very similar to us and also have budgets that are smaller than the US budget and so it means that we need to make our dollars work a bit harder if we’re try- ing to deliver some technological advantage.
“From Penten’s perspective, our primary export market is the UK and we’re exploring some of those opportuni- ties,” Wilson said. “But it’s a lot broader than that and to support our ally base and our regional partners. Our grand hope is that Australia will be our first customer through the collaborations that are coming out of C4 EDGE but,
ABOVE: The Solinnov team has been working on their Bluebottle tech for years now.
my genuine belief is that mid-term Australia won’t be our largest customer.”
SOLINNOV
Solinnov is a rapidly growing defence consultancy with many years of experience in the development of innovative and high-performance embedded signal processing solu- tions for software defined radios (SDR), with applications in wireless communications, radar and electronic warfare, according to a statement from the company. Solinnov is at the forefront of designing innovative real-time signal pro- cessing algorithms with the capacity to interpret and trans- mit signals within SDR systems.
Solinnov has developed an innovative SDR architec- ture called Pacific SDR architecture which is used for both communication and electronic warfare (EW) appli- cations. This architecture has been designed to provide flexibility and versatility in communications, radar and EW systems. Using Pacific SDR, Solinnov has designed a distributed networked receiver system called BlueBot- tle that uses the concept of an “application store” where desired communications and EW apps can be seamlessly loaded and unloaded onto a low-cost expendable system.
As part of C4I EDGE, Solinnov have proposed to demon- strate a proof of concept for a Sovereign mobile ad hoc net- work (MANET) using BlueBottle hardware. The proposed C4 EDGE MANET project will implement a mobile ad hoc net- work using Solinnov’s Halite waveforms to demonstrate the capabilities of a complete sovereign hardware and software package designed to meet the challenges of land warfare com- munications requiring rapid field and network deployments.
The project will foster and demonstrate Australian in- dustry’s capability in creating compact leading-edge MA- NET technology at low cost with applicability to other al- lied countries, a statement from the company said.
The C4I EDGE program has provided Solinnov with a great opportunity to expand the connectivity and commu- nications vision for BlueBottle development and allows the Solinnov team to continue to push their skills in advanced SDR and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) develop- ment for robust wideband real-time tactical communica- tions networks. ■
SOLINNOV