Quote:
Originally Posted by mff87
Looking for those who have started playing with the new generational Mesh Networks (Wave Relay, Trellisware, Harris ANW2 (117G, PRC-152A) and so on.) What are the pros and cons tht they have seen and what would make them better.
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I have used all of the systems you mentioned and a few others , to include the riflemans radio, in a side by side evaluation/vendor demo in one of the most restricitve environemts one could expect to use them as part of a structured evaluation and capability test for voice,data, live/real time video feed and situational awareness.
It would take me a few hours to go into the pros and cons of each one but to give you the BLUF, Wave relay (persistant systems) radio is clearly heads and shoulders above the other mfgrs products. It is able to do everything very well, it covered a vast amount of area with the least amount of radios and on the lowest power setting out of all systems tested and is easy to use and is ready to go as is rigth now and survive in a military environment.
A close second would be the radio from Trellisware. It is a very good system but the way its cables connect and the way they are built are not water/moisture proof as is and lack the robustness needed for use by military. This is probably its biggest weak link.
The riflemans, 152, 117 ,etc, all had to be jacked up to max power, (Some as high as 5 watts) to work for more than a few hundred meters, became very hot and required more radios to be carfully positioned in order to maintain voice,data,video capability and were basically all unfriendly to a fluid and changing environment. Meaning if one guy moved 2-3 feet in one direction and wasn't standing perfectly still, they would fall out of the net and comms with the farthest point would be lost.
Before someone gets their panties in a wad and writes a book about how their experience with X radio was different than what I typed here, keep in mind the environment we were testing it in was the most restrictive and unfriendly one that can be encountered and not one most people would probably had the chance to use these types of radios in.
The companies that make the situational/location centric,data type software interfaces that showed up predominately were all using Wave relay as the radio in their system to demonstrate what their software could do. This extended not only in the man worn radio systems but in some of the robotic platforms as well.