Spectra Group has announced at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) exhibition that there are now more than 4,000 of their SlingShot SATCOM systems in operation with U.S. Special Operations Forces.
This announcement follows on the heels of the company’s recent celebration of more than 7,000 SlingShot systems in operation with specialist and regular forces world-wide. The Spectra Group team will be available at AUSA to discuss their product capabilities.
Since the SlingShot launch at the Military Satellite Conference in London in November of 2014, this small and lightweight SlingShot system has proven to be hugely popular with the United States Special Operations Forces and Intelligence Communities. The system received safety accreditation from the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command for U.S. Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiments and has been recommended by Battle Labs for its continued deployment.
Spectra Group is now poised to help the U.S. Military leverage all of the key advantages of SlingShot, designed for specialist forces, to transform regular forces tactical communications capabilities throughout the wider U.S. Military on land, sea and air. Slingshot is perfect for missions where troops are deployed with minimal logistical support, in remote locations and have limited transport capacity. By integrating the SlingShot system with Inmarsat’s L-TAC satellite service, and attached to an in-service VHF or UHF radio, deployed troops instantly gain strategic communications over thousands of miles that would otherwise not be available without a significant communications infrastructure.
In addition to the robust Beyond Line of Sight (BLOS) voice capability, SlingShot also has sufficient bandwidth to carry critical data to support essential applications such as: situational awareness tools; GPS tracking; reporting and other data messaging without the requirement for ground-based line-of-sight re-broadcasting architecture.
Finally, the Slingshot omni-directional antennas provide manpack, land, sea and air platforms with real-time Comms on the Move (COTM) rather than having to be static, as experienced with traditional TACSAT systems.
Simon Davies, CEO of Spectra Group, said, “We are very proud of the Slingshot system and how successful it has been in solving the communications challenges faced by both specialist and regular forces when deployed all over the world in austere locations. Seven thousand units globally and 4,000 in the U.S. is a significant milestone. In Europe, SlingShot is now proving to be a battle-winning capability for regular forces and part of its success is the fact it is genuinely “plug and play,” converting any in-service tactical radio system into a BLOS and COTM SATCOM system with minimal training. We are now poised to help expand this capability from specialist to regular forces for the U.S. Military.”