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High Frequency Communications: Resilience in Satellite-Denied Environments


Equipped with High Frequency manpack radios, for example, tactically deployed forces in remote areas around the globe are capable of communicating over distances of 3,000 kilometers or more, even in satellite-denied and Radio Frequency-challenged environments. 

“High Frequency communications are always available even in the most-demanding, austere, denied environments on today’s battlefield,” said Keith Norton, L3Harris Technologies Communication Systems vice president of Europe and Canada Sales. “High Frequency provides an exceptional primary option in a denied environment in addition to supplementing and effectively reducing the burden on primary SATCOM systems.” 

Modern High Frequency communications assets deliver tactical advantage by allowing ground forces to remain on the move and in continual contact, transmitting both voice and data, while additionally offering the resiliency needed in contested environments. Without risking exposure, teams can leverage the full extent of its High Frequency communication radios to covertly coordinate with ground and aerial assets, as well as Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), with voice, text, images and other data, and even establish blue-force tracking capabilities absent of satellite connections and resilient against cyber threats.

New advances also include a resilient chat capability via ruggedized Android tablets, so soldiers won’t interface with the radio itself, yet just text in a way that is fairly common across all generations in today’s world. 

As the global leader in tactical communications, L3Harris Technologies is on the cutting edge of advancements in HF communications. Through continuous innovation, the company’s radios and related equipment deliver new and enhanced capabilities never before possible with legacy HF radios to ensure warfighters have the most resilient and proven solution. 

L3Harris leverages more than 50 years of engineering expertise to deliver new generation wideband HF capabilities, including data speeds up to 10 times greater than other HF radios, giving warfighters the power to share higher-speed communications and more sophisticated ISR through long-haul connectivity.
 
The company’s unmatched resilient waveform technology, integration of 4G ALE and suite of modern High Frequency accessories provide ground troops at the tactical edge of the battlespace the agility to effectively perform missions with speed when communicating with L3Harris’ Falcon® family of radios. More than 135,000 radios within the Falcon II and III lines have been delivered to date and are fully interoperable with each other and future iterations of the product line.

Further, the potential for further Multi-Domain Operation collaboration increases as more military aviators incorporate High Frequency radios into their platforms for increased interoperability with ground forces. 

“As you partner with L3Harris, you can take full advantage of utilizing known VULOS applications, such as ATAK, maximizing the value-add of the Beyond-Line-of-Sight capabilities that L3Harris HF brings today,” said Norton. “With this ease-of-use-focused development, L3Harris will continue to innovate and bring HF up the PACE Plan in your mission analysis.”

L3Harris solutions, including the Type 1 AN/PRC-160 and Type 3 RF-7800H, provide military advantages such as crypto-modernization enhancements, software-defined architectures for waveform and encryption updates and the ability leverage existing infrastructure, all in some of the smallest, lightest and fastest wideband High Frequency radios on the market. 

For more information about L3Harris Technologies’ full portfolio tactical HF radio solutions, visit www.l3harris.com/all-capabilities/tactical-hf-radios.

L3Harris HF BLOS Infographic