BAE Systems Australia has received a four-year contract worth $30 million to upgrade maritime satellite communications terminals for the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), the company announced on 25 May.
The company will increase bandwidth for the Maritime element of the Advanced SATCOM Terrestrial Infrastructure System (MASTIS) terminals, which will provide more efficient usage of defence satellite capacity and enhanced network interoperability between ships, aircraft and land based platforms.
The MASTIS terminals are equipped with two antennas which are capable of transmitting and receiving in X- and Ka-bands simultaneously and are able to connect to two different satellites at the same time. This dual-band, dual-antenna approach will provide the navy with advanced SATCOM availability and a substantial increase in the ships' data capabilities, even under heavy interference conditions.
MASTIS terminals equip three variants in the RAN fleet including the dual antenna terminal variant fitted to Landing Helicopter Dock vessels and Air Warfare Destroyers. In total the upgrade will address all of the navy’s in-service MASTIS fleet of 17 ship systems and one training suite.
BAE Systems will work with Airbus Defence and Space, which supplied a significant portion of the original terminals including the three axis stabilised antenna system.
Clavister CyberArmour, an integrated defence cybersecurity system, will be used on BAE Systems Hägglunds’ CV90 platform in deployments with a Scandinavian country, as well as in an eastern European nation.
The tactical satellite (TacSat) is an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) system and will participate in exercises in 2025.
The airborne three-domain, the two ground-based and the ¼ ATR OpenVPX-based cross-domain systems were engineered to provide real-time security across multi-domain operations.
DARPA’s Mission-Integrated Network Control (MINC) programme was set up to develop an autonomous tactical network and enable critical data flow in contested environments.
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