IDEX 2019: Ultra Electronics debuts NSS multidomain comms suite

Ultra Electronics is unveiling a ‘flexible architecture solution’ designed to optimise secure communications between land, air, and maritime platforms in a joint operating environment.

Speaking to Jane’s ahead of the launch at IDEX 2019 in Abu Dhabi on 17 February, company officials explained said the National Secure Solution (NSS) was devised to fill capability gaps in the interoperability of communications across the various domains.

“The NSS is a comprehensive suite of secure communications products, designed to integrate and meet the needs of military end users wishing to deploy a common suite of communications products across all their platforms,” a company spokesperson told Jane’s .

It is designed to facilitate ‘mission critical information’ sharing between platforms, and to encourage greater levels of interoperability across a joint force. Ultra Electronics officials said the solution is to provide armed forces with a data-agnostic capability to handle voice and data communications for line-of-sight (LoS) and beyond LoS (BLoS) operations.

The NSS is based on Ultra Electronics’ scalable Gemstone system, which is capable of handling multiple data streams to support video, command and control (C2), voice, and data communications as well as encryption services simultaneously over a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) bearer network.

Ultra Electronics said this includes connectivity to the company’s own inventory of airborne data links, which support the connectivity of unmanned aerial systems, fast jets, rotary-wing aircraft, and ground-based equipment. The NSS’s open architecture also means the Gemstone system can accommodate third-party technologies.