A software defined radio transformation

A handheld software defined tactical VHF/UHF radio used for AM/FM/PM line of sight communications is transformed into a single sideband HF band radio for HF 2G and 3G ALE networking. Military radio convergence presents real challenges to aggregation of widely variant narrowband waveforms. This paper discusses the hardware adaptations that allow a handheld VHF/UHF radio to act as the core radio of an HF band Manpack by simple software upgrade. This is an architectural discussion of how first generation software defined radios (SDR) are showing the promise that the SDR community has been promoting. Discussion covers baseband hardware architectures and the advantages and limitations of the current best practice software definable modem design. The addition of external frequency translation and power amplifier (PA) design are used to transform the base radio. This paper discusses the mix of signal processing software and hardware filtering used to complete the radio transformation.