A MAJOR PART OF THE MISSION OF THESE MET TERMINALS WILL BE TO PROVIDE FOR REACHBACK FOR DEPLOYED
WARFIGHTERS, SO THEY HAVE ACCESS TO THE GLOBAL INFORMATION GRID, WHICH IS CRITICAL FOR THE NETWORK-CENTRIC BATTLEFIELD.
I
n April 2009, the Army launched the massive Modernization of En- terprise Terminals (MET) program to upgrade its aging fleet of enter- prise strategic satellite communications (SATCOM) earth terminals, with the award of a $640 million contract to Har- ris Corp. of Melbourne, FL.
These new MET terminals will allow DoD services access to increased satellite bandwidth and will reduce acquisition and life-cycle logistics costs for Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps users.
Managed by the Defense Communica- tions and Army Transmission Systems Project Office (DCATS) of Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS), the MET program will produce approximately 100 SATCOM terminals to replace DoD terminals that are reaching the end of their life cycles. The first of these terminals is being built at Fort Belvoir, VA, with activation sched- uled for May. After that, DCATS will provide terminals via the MET contract to DoD organizations until 2019.
The MET program is critical to the Army’s and DoD’s future ability to lever- age the Global Information Grid and to
CONFIGURING CAPABILITIES
Customers will be able to order MET terminals in nine different configurations. Shown here are two 12.2-meter large fixed terminals that customers can order with X, X/Ka, or X/Ka/Ka capability. (Photo courtesy of Harris Corp.)
conduct network-centric operations in an increasingly information-rich battle- field environment.
“Net-centric operations require large hubs that can connect to many small terminals all around the world and facilitate their entry into the Global Information Grid,” said Don Hershberger, DCATS’ MET Product Leader. “A major part of the mis- sion of these MET terminals will be to provide for reachback for deployed war- fighters, so they have access to the Global Information Grid, which is critical for the network-centric battlefield.”
AGING SYSTEMS “One of the drivers for the MET program is that DoD’s fixed-enterprise family of terminals has been out there for quite a few years,” said Steve McClintock, DCATS’ Product Director Satellite Communications Systems. “We started deploying AN/FSC-78s in the 1970s, and AN/GSC-39s and AN/GSC-52s in the 1980s. So they are all approaching the end of their life cycles.”
Another driver, Hershberger said, was the launching of the new Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) constellation of satel- lites, starting in 2007, to gradually phase
”
out the 1980s-vintage Defense Satellite Communications System (DSCS) satel- lite constellation.
“We knew WGS was coming up a number of years ago, and we wanted to make sure that we had terminals that would allow the DoD to fully exploit that new WGS system because WGS has a lot more capa- bilities and a lot more functions than the old DSCS,” Hershberger said.
For instance, while DSCS operates only in the military X-band, WGS operates in both X-band and military Ka-band. MET terminals can operate in X-band or dual simultaneous X-band/Ka-band.
“So MET terminals can operate not only on the legacy DSCS satellites but also on the new WGS satellites, as well as on commercial satellites, such as XTAR [commercial X-Band],” Hershberger said.
Hershberger pointed out that each WGS satellite has a throughput of approximately 4.75 gigahertz (GHz) of bandwidth— about 10 times the bandwidth capacity of a DSCS satellite. “One single WGS sat- ellite has the bandwidth capacity of the entire 10-satellite DSCS constellation,” he said.
ASC.ARMY.MIL
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ACQUISITION
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