Partnership with Rutgers on Project PICKET
Today's fielded RF radios generally sit on one band and retune in place when conditions change. Retuning in place means the link goes quiet while the hardware settles, and a quiet link at the wrong moment is the same as no link at all.
Project PICKET takes a different approach. The radio runs several independent chains at once across three bands. One chain carries the traffic while a second chain, with its transmitter muted, tunes to the next candidate band and locks onto it. Only when the second chain is ready does the traffic move across. The settling time still happens, but it happens quietly in the background, so the connection never actually drops.
The second idea behind PICKET is about timing. Conditions may change faster than a radio can measure them, so a radio that waits to detect a problem is answering a question that has already gone stale. This can be approached algorithmically so any idle chain then spends a short moment confirming the best candidate channel rather than searching for it.
A satellite terminal losing signal in a rainstorm and an interceptor losing signal in plasma are, from the radio's point of view, the same request. Both need a way to change bands without losing the conversation. This is why I have partnered with Rutgers' COSMOS lab to find a way of fixing this.
Comments