US Army to begin satcom field testing for expeditionary signals units

The US Army is poised to begin field tests on a new suite of satellite communication (satcom) equipment for the service’s Expeditionary Signals Battalion-Enhanced (ESB-E) units, which will result in those units receiving organic communications capability for the first time.

The three communications systems being fast-tracked for experimentation focus on the ESB-E programme’s satellite baseband hardware and mobile expeditionary satcom terminals, said Paul Mehney, director of public communications at Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T).

Programme officials with the army’s Program Manager Tactical Network (PM Tactical Network), in conjunction with the US Army Futures Command’s Network Cross-Functional Team (N-CFT), in June awarded PacStar, Klas, and Dtech Labs support contracts, to provide network and mobile communication hardware for the three ESB-S systems slated for field tests. Army officials plan to field a total of 24 new network communication systems, one for each of the service’s ESB-E units.

Overall, the ESB-E programme represents “a modular, scalable, more agile version” of the current ESB systems, updated to support the service’s Integrated Tactical Network (ITN) initiative, an army fact sheet said. The new ESB-E programme also provides alternative organic networking capability “that reduces the reliance on legacy Warfighter Information Network Tactical (WIN-T) equipment,” it added.