Choosing the best hardware form-factor for the airborne domain of the Joint Tactical Terminal (JTT) and Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS)

Shrinking budgets, shortened design cycles, and the ready availability of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products and technology encourage future intelligence and tactical terminals, such as the JTT and the JTRS, to embrace widely- accepted, commercial standards and practices. Deployment of COTS products must however be balanced by any requirements for a robust environment, especially in the airborne domain which shows a bi-modal distribution of environments. The relatively benign requirement of landbased, inhabited-cabin/cargo, command posts, transports and tankers are contrasted with the needs of highly-mobile, tactical platforms, many of which are carrier-based. The use of commercial products and 19" rack-mount versus SEM-E, fully-ruggedized COTS and ATR for hardware module and chassis form-factors parallels these two distinct environmental constraints. The key to success is the application of a common architecture consisting of a "core" hardware design hosting common software modules for both airborne sub-domains.