Non-Subscriber Extract
Raven's new digital datalink promises major advance in data transfer
By Caitlin Harrington
26 February 2009
AeroVironment's (AV's) RQ-11B Raven, a hand-launched aerial drone that is widely deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, is about to become the first Class I unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to use a digital datalink for communications and image-sharing.
The US Army has signed a USD16.8 million contract with AV to build 50 new Ravens with a digital datalink and to retrofit the new datalink on 206 existing systems.
At present all Class I UAVs in service with US forces use an analogue datalink, which requires large amounts of bandwidth and radio frequency spectrum to transmit real-time intelligence.
The Raven's new digital datalink will dramatically reduce the amount of bandwidth required for information sharing, including bandwidth-saturating activities such as sending full motion video, according to AV's Raven programme manager, Scott Newbern.
He said the new datalink compresses bandwidth so that fewer radio frequency channels are needed to transmit the same amount of information.
For example, in a given geographic area, only four radio frequency channels are available to transmit information from a Raven operating on an analogue datalink.