B-52 bombers upgraded with advanced radios.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Brief Article

A new multimode radio system now being installed in the Air Force B-52 bomber enables bomber crews to communicate more easily with Navy ships.

The Air Force will spend $18.5 million to upgrade all 94 B-52H bombers and B-52G trainers. The ability to communicate with the Navy is important, because one of the B-52's missions is to support naval operations, said Larry L. Gray, project engineer for B-52H at DynCorp Technical Services, in Fort Worth, Texas. The company is responsible for assembling and installing the radios. The Air Combat Command is the agency that oversees the program.

The radio is called the AN/ARC-210 multimode set, made by Rockwell Collins Corporation. It covers frequencies between 30-400 Megahertz. Besides the ability to connect with Navy ships, the radio allows the B-52 to communicate with commercial frequencies, such as those used by airports. That is especially important in Europe, where many of the air bases host both civilian and military aircraft. The new ARC-210s will have VHF (very high frequency), UHF (ultra high frequency) and SATCOM (satellite communications) capabilities. More than 40 types of U.S. and allied aircraft, ships and ground platforms are equipped with these radios.

Under the contract, DynCorp also will upgrade the radios with the Demand Assigned Multiple Access (DAMA) capability. The original AN/ARC-210 in the B-52 did not have DAMA, said Gray in an interview. The DAMA is a much-desired feature in a radio, he explained, because it helps manage the bandwidth and makes the network more efficient. There are about 200-250 satellite transponder channels, but more than 14,000 platforms that would like to use those channels. Before DAMA was available, a user had to call into a network control organization and reserve a channel and a time slot. That process was wasteful, because transmissions usually take a few minutes and users would have the channel tied up for a full hour.

"DAMA puts the network control operations under a computer based system and allows multiple people to sign on," Gray said. The computer assigns satellite channels in real time. "It goes from a wideband to a narrow band system, so each of the transponder channels can carry more information," he added...