The newest contract was announced Oct. 5 by the U.S. Army and will be managed by the Army Contracting Command in Fort Monmouth. Raytheon will be responsible for the procurement and services needed for AEHF tactical terminals that are secure, mobile and resistant to jamming.  

AEHF is a constellation of communications satellites maintained by the Air Force Space Command for use by U.S. armed forces and selected allies. Two of the four constellation spacecraft are currently in orbit, with a third spacecraft scheduled to launch in 2013.

   Raytheon’s initiative to grow its AEHF business stems back to 2002, when the Air Force awarded Boeing a contract for Family of Advanced Beyond Line of Sight Terminals (FAB-T) that would work with the AEHF satellites. Raytheon submitted a proposal to the U.S. Air Force in June for the Family of Advanced Beyond Line of Sight Terminals (FAB-T) alternate program to provide secure, anti-jam communications for the U.S. president and senior military advisers.

   The Raytheon AEHF terminals have passed production acquisition milestone decisions and successfully tested with the on-orbit AEHF satellite, demonstrating interoperable communications using the satellite’s Extended Data Rate (XDR) waveform.

   "Raytheon is well positioned to provide the Air Force exactly what it is looking for — reliable, efficient, cost-effective terminals to handle one of the nation’s most sensitive and important communications needs,” Raytheon Network Centric Systems Vice President of Integrated Communication Systems Scott Whatmough said in a statement. “We already meet a substantial number of technical requirements and we will leverage them to meet the Air Force’s timeline for operational terminals by 2015."

Since 2002, Raytheon has won three separate contracts for similar terminals, all of which were upgrade contracts or new start programs that would introduce AEHF terminals to three different branches of the U.S. military. The Raytheon AEHF terminals passed production acquisition milestone decisions and successfully tested with the on-orbit AEHF satellite, demonstrating interoperable communications using the satellite’s Extended Data Rate (XDR) waveform.
   Whatmough previously spoke with Satellite News about demonstrations it recently conducted with the U.S. Air Force and the results it expects to see in the near future.

   “Obviously, we knew we couldn’t demonstrate the full AEHF capability in all of its modes and configurations in four hours, so the goal was to demonstrate to the Air Force that we really do have a significant portion of this capability to substantiate our claims,” said Whatmough. “We carefully went through the requirements and identified the areas that we believed the government would view as the most difficult and risky and demonstrated those capabilities at our facility in Marlboro, Mass. It was a big milestone for us. From our point of view, the demonstration went very well. We did a combination of over-the-air demonstrations. It’s hard to get time on the actual AEHF satellite, so we used a simulator that emulates the performance on the satellite. We couldn’t show the Air Force everything that we could do, but we showed them the hard stuff. We showed them some of the capabilities that are unique requirements to FAB-T that, for example, didn’t exist on NMT, but were developed on our Smart-T program.”