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As such, they are part of the core commu- PARTNER”. PARTNER is AQUILON’s
communication control management system,
nication system of all navy ships across the
Features world, regardless of budget or technology de- which: “integrates all the sub- systems and en-
sures coherence between them all”, Mr Kro-
velopment restrictions. Following this trend,
the industry has been working to develop new
toff con tinues. AQUILON has already been
HF radio models that address a number of
Frigates (Frégates Multi- Mission – FREMM)
known shortcomings. fitted onto the French Navy’s Multi Mission
In France, Thales has developed AQUILON, and Amphibious Assault Ships (Bâtiments de
its Fully Integrated Communication System Projection et de Commandement – BPC), and AT DSEI 2015 Thales presented the
(FICS). According to Pierre Krotoff, respon- will be fitted on the Royal Navy’s “Type 45” wideband-ready MSN 8200 radio,
sible for marketing naval communication destroyers as well as the “Queen Elizabeth” which increases the number of HF frequencies
available to navies, automatically selects
systems at Thales: “AQUILON is a solution aircraft carrier, to name but a few. the most appropriate one,
comprising a large number of sub-systems, As part of the AQUILON range, Thales pre- and will be easily upgraded to wideband.
such as HF, VHF, SATCOM, that are all man- sented at Defence and Security Equipment In-
aged by a centra lised IP architecture called ternational (DSEI) 2015 the wideband-ready
MSN 8200 radio. The new radio has
been developed to be able function
across up to sixteen non-contiguous
channels of 3kHz within a 200kHz
bandwidth. Mr Krotoff indicates: “With
this configuration of ‘frequency fami-
lies’, the system can automatically se-
lect the most suitable radio channel in
real time, no matter where a ship is or
regardless of ionospheric conditions”.
Moreover, the MSN 8200 radio has
been developed in order to facilitate
an upgrade to Wideband HF through
a field-installed plug-in module. “As
such, this new radio is capable of pro-
cessing 100 kilo bits per second (kbit/s),
as opposed to the current 19.2 kbit/s,
allowing the transfer of images, emails,
etc: think of it as the speed of the Inter-
net at home circa five years ago”, con-
cludes Mr Krotoff.
In Italy, Leonardo has been benefit-
ting from the Italian Navy moderni-
sation programme, Legge Navale, which
will see the new Fincantieri Offshore
Multipurpose Patrol Ship (Pattug liatore
Polivalente d’Altura – PPA), logistic
support ships and landing helicopter
docks replace part of the current fleet.
Within this programme, Leonardo is
developing new radios to be fitted onto
the new ships, including the HF 2000.
According to the products’ technical
fiche, the HF 2000 offers: “a common
set of modular equipment used to cre-
ate nodes varying from single station
to multi- station with up to 32 stations
spread over several split sites”. It offers
navies the possibility to choose across
up to 64 channels per frequency pool.

HF reloaded: US
The US defence industry is also
working to develop HF radio that are in-
teroperable and work across a range of
frequencies, allowing operators to easily
switch between frequencies depending
on their availability.
General Dynamics announced in
August 2016 that it had been awarded
a contract modi fication to improve HF
30 NAVAL FORCES III/2017