French naval communications will benefit from a capability enhancement with the advent of the Mercure HF communications system which will provide an increase in the capacity of High Frequency (HF: three megahertz/MHz to 30MHz) communications compared to current HF links.
This increase in capacity is focused on a widening of the HF bandwidth available to military users made possible via two changes in HF communications protocols at the US DoD and NATO levels: The US DoD’s Military Standard-188-110B (MIL-STD-188-110B) allocates 24 kilohertz/KHz of bandwidth for military HF communications while NATO’s Standardisation Agreement 4539 (STANAG-4539) provides up to 200KHz.
The principle