New Delhi, Feb 8 (IANS): The Ministry of Defence (MoD) and public sector undertaking Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) signed a contract here on Monday for the supply of Tactical Software-Defined Radios (SDRs) worth over Rs 1,000 crore.
The SDR is jointly designed and developed by the Defence Electronics Applications Laboratory (DEAL) of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) through a consortium of domestic agencies and industry. It will bring strategic depth to the armed forces.
The delivery will take place within three years.
The BEL is already supplying SDR-Naval Combat (NC) whereas SDR-Air is under user evaluation trial. The DRDO and BEL plan to provide the latest SDRs with security grading to the armed forces.
The SDR is a four-channel, multi-mode, multi--band, 19-inch rack mountable, ship-borne system. It is intended to take care of ship-to-ship, ship-to-shore and ship-to-air voice and data communication for network-centric operations. It supports simultaneous operation of all the four channels covering V/UHF and L Bands.
This SDR system houses multiple waveforms for narrow band and wide band applications.
"The MANET waveforms are available in UHF and L Bands to support ad-hoc networking feature for net-centric operations," the Defence Ministry said.
User-evaluation trials covering exhaustive harbour phase and sea phase trials were completed successfully during May to June 2018 at Visakhapatnam.
Interoperability trials were also successfully carried out with all other form factors covering airborne SDR-AR on board Dornier aircraft, SDR-Tac on board INS Kirch in sailing mode, SDR-Manpack and SDR-Handheld.
All the aspects were evaluated successfully by all user agencies of the Navy and clearance was accorded for the procurement.
The Indian armed forces are in need of transition from the single-purpose radio of the past to more flexible SDRs to serve most of their wireless communication needs. These SDRs will be backward compatible with existing radios.
Different service groups require different form factor radios for specific platforms and waveforms/applications.
"The SDRs allow use of common waveform/application implementation methods for different form factors. They also allow implementation of futuristic waveforms on the same hardware using software programmability, thus ensuring longer life and savings on cost," said the Ministry.