The communications resource planning tool

In tactical environments where radio communications is critical to operational missions, the ability to predict connectivity is of primary importance. Success in closing radio links in these scenarios depends to a great degree on degradations to the link including obstructions that might obscure line of sight between transmitters and receivers. Jammers can also severely degrade communications performance. The effects of these factors must be taken into consideration in the planning and performance prediction of tactical wireless links. This paper describes a tool that can be used to plan communications links in the presence of degradations such as path obstructions or the effects of jammers. We describe the tool and its features. The equations for determining the impact of jammers are provided and an example is shown.