Thales Awarded Tactical Radio Contract

The French defense procurement agency (DGA) has recently notified Thales of the award of the development contract for the CONTACT program. This program is designed to equip the majority of the French forces' platforms with next-generation tactical radios incorporating innovative software-defined radio technology. Six European nations-Finland, France, Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden-launched the ESSOR project (European Secure Software defined Radio) in 2009. ESSOR aims to establish a baseline standard for development and production of military software-defined radios in Europe. An ESSOR reference architecture has been defined and shared between the European partners, compatible with the United States standard, and a coalition high-data-rate (HDR) waveform has been developed to provide the basis for a new standard.