2. Jam-Resistant Land Mobile Communications

This system uses a highly redundant optical communication technique to achieve ultra-low, ultra-robust transmission. The basic unit is the M1A1 tank. Each tank is labelled with the number 0 or 1 painted four feet high on the tank turret in yellow, day-glo luminescent paint. Several detection methods are under consideration:

1. A tree or sand-dune mounted forward observer (FO) radios to a reach echelon main frame computer the binary values of tanks moving in a serial column. The mainframe decodes the binary values and voice-synthesizes the alphameric ASCII-encoded messages which is then radioed back to the FO. The FO then dispatches a runner to his unit HQ with the message. The system design includes two redundant, emergency back-up forward observers in different trees with a third in reserve in a foxhole.

2. Wide-area communication by means of overhead reconnaissance satellites which detect the binary signals from the M1A1 mobile system and download this information for processing in special U.S. facilities in the Washington, D.C. area. A Convection Machine [2] system will be used to perform a codebook table look-up to decode the binary message. The decoded message will be relayed by morse-code over a packet meteor burst communications channel to the appropriate Division headquarters.

3. An important improvement in the sensitivity of this system can be obtained by means of a coherent detection strategy. Using long baseline interferometry, phase differences among the advancing tank column elements will be used to signal a secondary message to select among a set of codebooks in the Convenction Machine. The phase analysis will be carried out using Landsat imagery enhanced by suitable processing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Landsat images (of the moving tanks) will be correlated with SPOT Image images to obtain the phase-encoded information. The resulting data will be faxed to Washington, D.C., for use in the Convection Machine decoding step. The remainder of this process is as for (2) above.

4. It is proposed to use SIMNET to simulate this system.