Results from field tests of stanag 4538

The Swedish Armed Forces use HF manpack radios to communicate between vehicles and base stations in international missions, such as ISAF in Afghanistan and the EU Nordic Battle Group 2011. During 2011 a major upgrade of the whole information system was planned including replacing the old 2G-ALE radios with the 3G-ALE based Harris RF-5800H manpack radio system. A number of enhancements to the 3G-ALE standard and to the IP handling have been added by Harris - and reported in [1], [2] and [3] - making the radio ideally suited in this type of missions. As part of that replacement a number of field trials were conducted in Sweden to verify that the radio system will be able to forward the requested traffic, which mainly consist of position reporting (Friendly Force Tracking) and secure voice communication. In order to increase the message transfer reliability, meaning the percentage of position reports received from a vehicle on the move, various means of antenna arrangements and types, frequency use, transmission schemes and diversity techniques were analyzed and tested. The paper presents the results from these field tests as reported in [4], [5] and [6].