Mercury Systems has received $16 million in follow-on orders from the US Navy for advanced Digital RF Memory (DRFM) jammers. This is in addition to the $152 million 5 year sole-source basic ordering agreement (BOA) they currently have with the Navy. The orders were received in the fourth quarter of the Company's fiscal 2019 year and are expected to be delivered over the next several quarters.
Mercury DRFM jammers are size, weight and power (SWaP) optimized to meet the unique requirements of airborne pod-based solutions and incorporate decades of DRFM technology development, validated electronic attack techniques, and custom RF components.
According to Mercury Defense Systems, the design and manufacturing teams remain committed to meeting the growing demands for mission critical components for the U.S. military’s electronic warfare (EW) test and training program. In addition to satisfying current requirements for DRFM technology, Mercury is focused on developing the innovative solutions essential for the next generation of advanced DRFM capabilities to address broader system requirements and a more complex EW concept of operations.
What is a DRFM?
- Provides coherent time delay of RF signals (typically in radar applications)
- Produce coherent deception jamming to a radar system
- Captured radar pulse can be replayed with a small delay
- A change in the delay of the false target makes it appear to move
- Captured pulse data can be modulated in amplitude, frequency, and/or phase to provide other affects
- Doppler shift is added so range and range rate trackers will correlate in the radar
- Captured pulse can be replayed many times so the radar "sees" many targets
- A DRFM can produce an arbitrary waveform from a file
Mercury’s latest generation DRFM technology produces modules as thin as 0.44 inches (standard modules are 0.8 inches wide, typical peer solutions are double width or 1.6 inches wide) and leverage the advantages of Direct Digital Synthesizer (DDS) Local Oscillator (LO) technology. DDS delivers sub-microsecond tuning speeds over a wide bandwidth but this is only beneficial if their associated digital noise is compensated for or eliminated. Advanced circuit design and materials, IMA topology and construction and especially, detailed design simulation drives our excellent spurious, inter-module and phase noise performance – DDS noise is completely negated.
