Horizon Aerospace Technologies (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Horizon Technologies) has released their new airborne SIGINT product — BlackFish™ — a small, airborne qualified, Sat Phone SIGINT system that simultaneously monitors the Iridium, Thuraya and Inmarsat (IsatPhone Pro) Sat Phone networks.
Due to its small size and weight (8 kg), BlackFish is ideal for fixed and rotary wing, manned and unmanned aircraft. BlackFish™ is based on a Software Defined Radio (SDR), equipped with powerful CPU and GPU processing capacity, a passively cooled system ensuring maximal reliability and performance. The system has no moving parts which ensures high reliability during operation in extreme conditions and is fully qualified to DO-160.
BlackFish™ is a completely self-contained Sat Phone monitoring system; it doesn’t require any external peripherals such as external RF switching and complex cabling or multiple antennas which impacts the overall reliability of the system. The highly sensitive L-band receiver front-end targets Sat Phone communications, and the system offers maximum out of band rejection of interference frequencies while being broadband, and having an excellent dynamic range to handle near-far radio scenarios. With the company’s proprietary software, it can be easily integrated into aircraft tactical mission systems to look like one of many ISR sensors. BlackFish is now in production.
Horizon Technologies’ CEO, John Beckner, said, “Horizon Technologies has been listening to our customers who want smaller, lighter systems and the ability to simultaneously monitor multiple Sat Phone networks. They also want a common SIGINT product across manned aircraft and UAVs. BlackFish™ is the answer to these requirements and like all our products is non-ITAR. We will have an actual production version at our stand at DSEI 14-17 September 2021 (UK Pavilion: H2-958), and will be demonstrating the system’s capabilities. While we are still supporting our legacy FlyingFish™ products, BlackFish™ is now our flagship product, and we are excited to be selling it to our worldwide government end users in support of their expanding ISR requirements. We have demo units available for evaluation anywhere worldwide and we look forward to engaging with our current and future customers to introduce BlackFish™ as the “go to” Sat Phone SIGINT solution.””