Satellites Become Vital to Signal Success

This is the third in a series of interviews with signaleers, one for each of SIGNAL Magazine's seven decades, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of AFCEA International.

1986-1995

When David Baciocco began flying planes for the Navy aboard the USS Nimitz in 1987, satellite communications did not exist on aircraft. Instead he employed line of sight and high frequency, push-to-talk communications to complete missions.

Now the director of government solutions for Raytheon Applied Signal Technology Inc., Baciocco witnessed immense change between the years 1986 and 1995 in regard to signal communications technologies and information technology functions. 

Baciocco started out as an operator and relied on flashing lights and flags, among other things, to communicate. “We had orders that said, ‘Go forth and do good things. These are your positions.’ And then we reported back over high frequency communications and it worked,” he says. “You have more ability to do processing on your iPhone now than I did when I got to that ship in 1987. But we managed.”

Video became extremely important during this time period, Baciocco acknowledges. It began with reconnaissance missions, but when the demand for communications between commanders grew, teleconferencing changed tremendously the need for satellite communications. 

The Navy began by using ultra high frequency satellite communications at a very low data rate, principally for voice communications. Then it moved to a defense satellite communications system put up on either U.S. coast to provide nuclear-survivable communications. “The most you could get through on what they called the stress channel, when a transponder was completely saturated with power, was 75 bits. But that was enough. [The Navy] just wanted to make sure it could absolutely, positively be delivered when you needed it to be,” Baciocco says. 

Prior to operation Desert Storm, the Navy had four or five command ships with this type of satellite communication capability, and the most they were getting was 9.6 kilobits per second. During Desert Storm, the Navy needed to coordinate with the Air Force to receive orders from the computer-generated air tasking order (ATO). The ATO was hundreds of pages thick and specified the exact details of operation for every aircraft in the campaign. The only way to get it to the Navy was to physically print it out and fly it out to the ships. The Air Force did not have a bandwidth problem because it was onshore, so the Navy had to play catch-up, Baciocco says. 

“We took Marine Corps and Army ground terminals, shelterized them, put them on the flight deck and went with it. We still didn’t get a whole lot of data rate, but we finally had connectivity,” Baciocco relates. 

Commercial communications also have changed drastically since 1986. During Desert Storm it was an 80/20 split between military and commercial. “I think if you went out there today, you’d find it’s 90 percent commercial, 10 percent military—not because we are using less military, but because the requirements for communications have changed,” Baciocco says. 

For the past 15 years, the United States has been fighting a war that principally depends on full-motion video and wide-area surveillance type systems that require increased meta communications, Baciocco asserts. The appetite does not diminish when it comes to getting information. Whether all that information is usable “beats the heck out of me,” Baciocco states. “I like to think it is.”

Information technology has undergone a fair amount of change as well. When Baciocco graduated from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1990, he still had to take data to a super computer and compile it there. “There are still things like Cray doing complex processing jobs, but it was more of a norm until people started realizing how much power they could put on a desktop,” Baciocco says. 

The ability to store things has greatly improved. Processors have become much faster and much smaller while the data pass within processors has increased, allowing data to move more quickly and extend into networking. 

“When I got to that battle group staff in February of 1987, I had a Xerox 860 on my desk that dealt in eight-inch floppies; it was not networked to anything. And that was kind of cutting edge,” Baciocco says. “Today you can get a laptop with a 500-gigabit hard drive.”

Overall communication is more real-time than in 1986. “If you need something right now it can be pushed to you via email or the Internet. There are help desks and operation centers that you can deal with directly. Back then, the only way to make sure something got there in real time was to pick up a radio and call somebody,” he observes.

Challenges still arise with today’s communications, though. “Sometimes you’ll find that you send an email to someone to do something and you don’t hear back from them. You assume they did it even though in reality they broke their arm yesterday, need surgery and aren’t checking their email,” Baciocco says. And with the exception of video teleconferencing, it is less personal. “I prefer the personal touch,” he declares.