For the first time, coalition partners authorised by the U.S. Department of State can purchase upgrades for their transceivers through L3Harris to achieve interoperability with U.S. forces using NSA encryptions. The NSA crypto cores will be made available to eligible allied nations through Foreign Military Sales contracts.
Byron Anderson, Director of Product Line Management at L3Harris, said the approval marked a significant milestone for the company’s video datalink portfolio. “This effort was only possible through close collaboration between L3Harris and the NSA on an expedited approval process, and these two products are the first test cases validated with this concept,” he said.
Anderson added that the company intends to extend this approach across additional systems once domestic certifications are complete. “We are now pursuing approvals through this process for the rest of our video datalink products including CMDL 2c as soon as their respective U.S. domestic variants complete certification,” he said.
Designed for air, surface and maritime use, the L3Harris ROVER line provides real-time full-motion video and network data to support situational awareness, targeting, surveillance and battle damage assessment. The systems also support relay, convoy overwatch and other operations where continuous eyes-on-target are required.
Embedded frequency diversity within the ROVER product line provides link redundancy and resilient reception in challenging environments. This design mitigates the effects of platform shadowing, multi-path interference, line-of-sight blockages and radio frequency interference.
ROVER 6S features a broad waveform set that enables interoperability with virtually all large airframes, unmanned aerial vehicles and targeting pods currently deployed in operational theatres. This allows seamless integration across a wide range of platforms without additional system modification.
Previously, international customers could only purchase exportable “i” variants of ROVER, which were not capable of interoperating with systems operating on NSA high-assurance channels. Approval of the “c” variants now enables protected coalition interoperability between U.S. troops and forces from more than 50 eligible nations.
