Persistent Systems to Supply Radios to Army Weapons of Mass Destruction Teams

Persistent Systems, LLC of New York will supply 950 MPU5 radios to the U.S. Army National Guard's Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Teams (WMD-CSTs) under a $8.9 million contract vehicle in support of the Army's Unified Command Suite (UCS) Program of Record, which is managed by the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical Biological Defense (JPEO-CBD). The UCS program aims to provide communications interoperability between military emergency response elements and Federal, State, and Local authorities on the scene of an incident. The MPU5 radios enable a high-speed communication network to be established quickly, within the self-contained UCS communications vehicle, allowing CST personnel to operate across an incident area while remaining connected both to the vehicle and to each other. The MPU5 radios provide push-to-talk audio, video encoding, and an integrated Android computing environment that allows the installation of third-party applications. Its long range and throughput (exceeding 100 Mbps) enables CSTs to network their sensors and transmit data collected in the field to the UCS vehicle and then on to a national lab for analysis. "Whether at a campaign rally or along a marathon route, National Guard Civil Support Teams run WMD detection operations to keep Americans safe," said Louis Sutherland, vice president of business development for Persistent. "MIMO radios thrive in urban environments, where standard radios have trouble." The radio integration is being performed by NAVAIR in Patuxent River, Maryland.