The Challenge...

The pioneering work done in Great Britain by highly resourceful, vulpine and profoundly bright teams in WWII led to the creation of this country’s world leading government establishment(s) and capabilities for SIGINT, ELINT and COMINT. Shrouded, quite rightly, in a lot of sensitivity – it set the approach on signal acquisition, DF and decipherment - and still pioneers to this very day...

For those that understand signals acquisition this isn’t as easy as it is in the Lab or in films! On Sea it is immensely complex… a platform that pitches and yaws, that has lots of its own ducting, resonating and reflecting elements (such as hand rails) and the Sea itself causing all sorts of ducting and interesting effects vs frequency and angle of arrival. On Land the geology and flora comes into play (eg trees of certain types), and urban is an interesting challenge in itself.. Airborne again has its set…

The crucial element is to firstly acquire the signals and process them to get at the original signal – digging deep into the noise floor if necessary. Second is to understand its direction of arrival in the time domain (lets not discuss FDOA), thirdly is to classify the signal attributes, fourthly is to tag it and catalogue if it hasn’t been seen before, and fifth is to then prosecute the signal and decode it for content whatever that might be, enciphered or otherwise. All has to be done within an ethical and legal framework too and our systems deeply embed those controls. So too is data security and integrity a key issue for the platform which we take care of using industry leading technologies and assured products, techniques and approaches.

I’m often troubled when I see static systems (in country – often called strategic capabilities), being modified for a field use – oh they are so different algorithmically at the front end. I’m not saying it can’t be done as there are a few companies that do – but it isn’t straightforward. Our capabilities are focused at the very hard end of tactical deployed troop – long reach signal acquisition and modular in design. We pride our self to integrate SIGINT, ELINT and COMINT in a single system design – but we recognise strategic off-netting of the target signals and not doing all (or even some) of the COMINT locally. All systems have very sophisticated [down to chip level], self destruct so reliance on a couple of grenades is not an option we bank on – nor removal of disks in an ambush or compromise for destruction. These are all safely killed without harm to the system user (even if it is on his or her back at the time).

That’s just one part of one area of what we do – it doesn’t explain the jamming and the integration of such, it deliberately says very little about the signal types.. Given Intelligence collection is a moving challenge – ever changing, ever more complex, it is crucial to keep secure the signals types and functionality. We do not believe in on-line product brochures, we also don’t believe it is right to advertise the signals, functionality, range and accuracy without very strict government controls – even if they are unclassified.

Terrorists and unfriendly nations are not inept generally and are becoming ever more sophisticated at finding the weaknesses – and publishing what can and can’t be done is quite frankly nuts! It is a sad reality of a COTS centric procurement strategy that this forces company’s to market more openly its developments – a very worrying trend if partnering isn’t entered into to for the government to approve and develop MOTS in key areas.

For our company ethos is to keep all product capabilities totally discreet on the Military and Law Enforcement side, to highly innovate, to challenge and enhance current approaches – to solve the gaps and indeed predict the future exploitation routes. What we won’t do is blindly send out our product information so if you want to know your going to have to come via UK MoD. For our Commercial Products we directly market these or partner as is appropriate and you can contact us directly on those. We currently have just under 50 products of varying states of maturity all focused on revealing and pursuing; And understanding the Truth of what has happened, is happening and what is going to happen.....