The Navy Multiband Terminal (NMT) will allow U.S. military vessels to use a single antenna to communicate with different satellites, saving space and logistics costs. NMT is a system of submarine, shore-based and shipboard communications terminals for the transformational satellite communications (SATCOM) component of the U.S. Navy's FORCEnet concept.
WASHINGTON DC, June 4, 2007 - Satnews Daily - The Raytheon Company has won the $1 billion Navy Multiband Terminal (NMT) satellite communications program over Harris Corporation.
The U.S. Department of Defense said Raytheon will be the prime contractor for NMT, which will provide communications terminals for the U.S. Navy and allies like the U.K., the Netherlands and Canada. The terminals will be deployed on ships, submarines and on-shore installations, and it is intended to work with a wide variety of military communications satellites. In all, some 300 terminals are required, which will begin fielding in 2010.
Raytheon won an initial $21 million contract that is worth up to $960 million if all of its options are exercised, the Pentagon said. Work is expected to end by 2011, but if all options are used it could extend through 2015, according to the contract announcement.
Harris said it was disappointed but hoped to reuse its technology on other programs. "We did do a lot of work on this program, developing a lot of communications expertise that we believe we can use in other programs and other satellite opportunities in the future," said Harris.
The NMT program, led by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), seeks to exploit the extended data-rate (XDR) capability that will be offered by the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite communications system. NMT terminals will be more reliable than existing terminals, provide more bandwidth and be compliant with the Software Communications Architecture (SCA), enabling coherence with the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) program.
The key contrast with current systems is that NMT will be a multi-band, rather than single-band, solution. With the development of international partner variants, it will also be an exportable design, thereby providing a boost for coalition warfighting. Harris Government Communications Systems Division and Raytheon were awarded two competitive contracts for the development of NMT in late 2003.
NMT’s core capability is to provide multi-band communications that are secure, jam resistant and survivable to the Navy’s fleet of ships, submarines and shore installations. The communication service will primarily be provided via the AEHF satellite constellation, when it is launched, as well as interfacing with legacy satellites, both MILSTAR and UHF Follow-On (UFO) satellites.
