Steve at HFIA

Earlier this month the High Frequency Industry Association (HFIA) held their first meeting of 2019 in San Diego.  Isode CEO, Steve Kille, attended and gave three presentations at the meeting.

The first looked at measurements of HF Modem transmissions over a channel simulator using Collins modems and simulator.  It investigates the impact of varying Interleavers for STANAG 4539 and STANAG 5069 waveforms. This presentation can be found here.

The second presentation was an overview of two whitepapers we recently published on the Isode website, Messaging Protocols for HF Radio and Measuring Performance of Messaging Protocols for HF Radio.

The final presentation gave results from an XMPP over HF trial funded by the UK MoD. The trial was carried out by Babcock, using Isode XMPP software, to evaluate the viability of providing a real time chat service for Naval and Airborne communications over HF.

Reporting from the Nordic HF Conference – New HF ALE (Automatic Link Establishment)

Isode CEO, Steve Kille, is attending, presenting at and reporting from the Nordic HF Conference (HF 16) on the island of Faro, Sweden.

Professor Eric Johnson led Wednesday morning’s session with an excellent presentation on new ALE work, called 4G ALE or Wideband ALE (Wideband ALE – The next generation of HF). This was followed by a presentation by Harris on preliminary measurements. Eric noted the importance of work in this area to support new WBHF and to reduce setup times. This is key technology for HF.

This work is being done by US DoD, with support from key US vendors (in particular Harris and Rockwell Collins). I asked when details of this work might be made available, and the answer was “not clear” and perhaps end of next year. This will likely be at the point when the work is published as a US Mil Spec. Then it will be shared with the rest of the world, and presented as a fait accompli for NATO to standardise. This may be a good way to achieve a solid standard. However, it feels to be locking out non-US involvement and giving unfair competitive advantage to US vendors.

Reporting from the Nordic HF Conference – Wide Band HF

Isode CEO, Steve Kille, is attending, presenting at and reporting from the Nordic HF Conference (HF 16) on the island of Faro, Sweden.

WBHF is a key new development, and there were two good papers at Nordic HF on measurements during Session 2 on Monday.

Vivianne Jodalen, Terje Mikal Mjelde and William M. Batts reported on measurements made in the arctic (Wideband HF in the Arctic) and measurements made across the Atlantic (Performance of a transatlantic long-haul wideband HF system).

The good news is that a range of successful measurements were made in over-the-air environments. The practical results suggest that 6kHz channels (wider than 3 kHz narrowband) can often be achieved, but it was often not possible to realise the maximum of 24kHz. Throughput was generally quite a bit less than the “top end”.

While this is useful information and gives performance much better than narrow band, it is a long way short of the top end 120 kbps. I think there is a real risk that people have been over-sold WBHF and will be disappointed with the reality. This would be a pity, as it offers useful improvements.

HFIA Meeting (San Diego) 2015

The High Frequency Industry Association (HFIA) provides “an industry driven forum for the interactive exchange of technical ideas and information in the area of High Frequency Communications”.

There are usually two physical meetings a year, the first of 2015 took place this month in San Diego and our CEO (Steve Kille) attended and presented.

Steve’s presentation looked at BRASS (Broadcast and Ship to Shore) and its use for Organizational Message Naval communication over HF Radio. He showed how BRASS works as well as how and why current deployments use a range of very old technology. He then described Isode’s strategy which involves introducing new COTS software for BRASS systems that support legacy systems, as well as providing a migration path to state of the art HF and Messaging technologies.

Steve’s slide set from the talk is available for viewing on the Isode website (PDF).

New Event: Isode at the High Frequency Industry Association

Isode will be presenting at the High Frequency Industry Association (HFIA) meeting at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK on 11th September 2014. We’ll be presenting two separate sessions:

  1. An update to and measurement of the proposed STANAG 5066 extensions to improve ARQ performance, and
  2. A demonstration of bulk and time critical applications co-existing over HF and WBHF and using those extensions.

We’ll be using a number of Isode applications for messaging including email, chat and forms data submission on a range of mobile devices during the demo.