Navy ramping-up procurements of Mercury's radar-spoofing digital electronic warfare (EW)
LAKEHURST, N.J., 12 April 2016. U.S. Navy airborne electronic warfare (EW) experts are asking the Mercury Defense Systems (MDS) subsidiary of Mercury Systems Inc. in Cypress, Calif., to build 28 additional electronic radar-spoofing devices under terms of a $15.4 million order announced last week.
Officials of the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Lakehurst, N.J., are asking Mercury to provide 28 Type II Advanced Techniques for Digital Radio Frequency Memories (DRFM) units.
The Mercury Airborne 1225 ruggedized air-cooled, airborne 3-bit miniaturized digital RF memory (DRFM) was developed for airborne, pod, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications with as much bandwidth as 1200 MHz. It is self-contained with internal techniques and RF and power supplies.
Mercury won a $7.6 million order from the Navy last June to build 14 Type II DRFM units. Previous to that, Mercury won a $2.6 million DRFM order in October 2014, and a $1.5 million Navy order for this technology in June 2014.
DRFM technology has several features. First, it provides coherent time delay of RF signals in applications like radar and electronic warfare. It also produces coherent deception jamming to a radar system by replaying a captured radar pulse with a small delay, which makes the target appear to move.
Related: Programmable radar and adaptive electronic warfare take center stage
DRFM also can modulate captured pulse data in amplitude, frequency, and phase to provide other affects. A Doppler shift correlates range and range rate trackers in the radar. DRFM also can replay captured radar pulses many times to fool the radar into perceiving many targets.
Small packages, fast response, and large volumes of low-latency compute power define modern DRFM evolution, Mercury officials say. The company's latest DRFM technology produces modules as thin as 0.44 inches, and capitalizes on direct digital synthesizer (DDS) local oscillator (LO) technology.
DDS delivers sub-microsecond tuning speeds over a wide bandwidth, while advanced circuit design and simulation helps reduce spurious, inter-module and phase noise.
The Mercury 1225 DRFM has more than 15 dBc worst-case spurious suppression across the entire band with typical spurs of more than 19 dBc. The Airborne 1225 has storage for as many as 48 user-defined deception programs.
Related: Two research firms picked for DARPA EW program to counter programmable adaptive radar
"The continued technology advancements are designed to keep pace with the evolving threats and ensure U.S. aircrews are being properly trained prior to engagements in combat environments," said Brian Perry, president of Mercury Defense Systems, after last June's DRFM order.
Electronic countermeasures techniques for pipeline, stretched pulse including synthetic continuous wave, and multiple false target modes are defined through the device's user interface.
The unit has one RF converter, one converter/memory, and one system controller; three bit phase encoding at 1.2 GHz instantaneous bandwidth; can program each false target for range, Doppler, and bi-phase; can track as many as four emitters; and offers internal techniques against two to four emitters.
On this latest DRFM order, Mercury will do the work in Cypress, Calif., and should be finished by January 2018. For more information contact Mercury Defense Systems online at www.mrcy.com/defense_systems, or the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division-Lakehurst at www.navair.navy.mil.
John Keller | Editor
John Keller is editor-in-chief of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, which provides extensive coverage and analysis of enabling electronic and optoelectronic technologies in military, space, and commercial aviation applications. A member of the Military & Aerospace Electronics staff since the magazine's founding in 1989, Mr. Keller took over as chief editor in 1995.
