Powerful new UHF satellite system expected by end of 2015.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

After more than a decade of development, 2015 promises to be a key year for the Navy's mobile user objective system communication satellite.

The four spacecraft that comprise the core of the fleet should all be in orbit by the end of the year, which will give users seamless on-the-move links almost everywhere on the planet.

The satellites' deployment will converge with that of the warfighter information network-tactical (WIN-T) increment 2, which will give individual ground troops unparalleled voice and data connectivity through nodes that connect to the spacecrafts' robust UHF band.

"Never before have we been able to see a dismounted, disadvantaged, downrange pointy end [of the stick] soldier being able to talk thousands of miles back to another location," said Chris Marzilli, president of General Dynamics C4 Systems.

The Navy has deployed two of the four satellites needed for global coverage, with the third expected to leave the Lockheed Martin factory in California the first week of November on its way to Cape Canaveral, Florida, said Iris Bombelyn, the company's vice president of narrowband communications.

MUOS number three is scheduled to launch sometime in January and the fourth in August, she said in an interview. Lockheed Martin is under contract to produce a fifth on-orbit spare by 2016. The Navy will not consider the MUOS deployment complete until that final spacecraft is on orbit in 2017, she said. But as far as users are concerned, they should be able to connect to the satellites almost anywhere on the planet by the end of calendar year 2015 after on-orbit checkouts are complete.

"When the entire constellation is up, you can go from anyplace in the world to anyplace in the world and talk," she said.

Some have compared it to a "cell phone tower in the sky," Bombelyn said. It will have 16 times the capacity of the legacy Ultra High Frequency Follow-On satellites they are replacing.

Users will be able to send and receive pictures, videos and text while talking just as they can with a typical smartphone, she said. "You don't have to drop off the voice line to look at data," she said.

The Navy made a prescient move when MUOS was still on the drawing board to go with the then-nascent 3G technology, Bombelyn said.

"In 2004, 3G was cutting edge, it was just a gleam," she said.

Each of the four satellites cover about two-thirds of the Earth, so the overlap creates seamless coverage, she noted.

They were not required to provide strategic...