C4ISR Forum MT 2/2022 · 45 their radio emissions. Typical control links operate at frequencies of 2.45.8GHz – Rohde & Schwarz maintains that naval COMINT systems can detect such signals and alert operators to an inbound threat. The system may also be able to use the UAV’s radio link to pinpoint the position of both drone and ‘pilot’. Once located, kinetic or electronic weapons can be brought to bear, or law enforcement vectored for apprehension. And the threat is proliferating. As COMINT specialist TCI notes, “container ports, oil refineries, desalination plants and other shore-based critical infrastructure are vulnerable to disruption or destruction” by UAVs. COMINT thus plays a key role in protecting these facilities as well as individual vessels. Processing Challenges Signal saturation – the fact that some or many of the innumerable emissions of interest may be close to each other – or even overlapping – presents a further problem. Consider a potential clandestine meeting between small boats in a coastal area, with each vessel communicating by radio. On a busy day in the emissions spectrum, their transmissions are subsumed into the morass of cellphone, radio, satcom and broadcast traffic. Software helps enormously in finding the signal of interest within this mess, but the computers need powerful processors to wade through the dross to find that small, tell-tale transmission. Kilgallen believes this ongoing spectrum saturation, propelled in part by the advent of 5G, will result in COMINT system computing having “larger processing requirements to successfully prosecute targets using these technologies [and that] the problem set for COMINT is interference mitigation, deconfliction with friendly forces’ networks and then still having a system with broad coverage and deep processing, capable of not missing targets”. It is no longer sufficient for naval COMINT to confine itself to collecting military signals: the apparatus must collection Intimately familiar with waveforms, conversant with every form of electronic warfare and currently up to C7ISR, Dr Tom Withington regularly illuminates some of the more arcane elements of defence electronics for MilTech readers. 5G does not give you Covid, as conspiracy theorists suggest, but it could give COMINT practitioners a headache due to the sheer number of subscribers networks can host. (Photo: via YouTube)
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