Military operations heavily rely on Radio Frequency (RF) signals for urgent mission intelligence. In situational awareness, RF signals deliver early warning and tracking of troops, both friendly and hostile forces, aircraft, ships, and drones. Battlefield communications depend on RF to carry voice, text, and data between units. And in electronic warfare, RF receivers can geolocate threats and help to generate actionable intelligence.
But there’s a challenge - military operators struggle to capture and process the data fast enough to match modern sensor ingest capabilities. Modern sensors can capture huge amounts of instantaneous bandwidth (IBW) within the electromagnetic spectrum causing issues with storing or analyzing that data fast enough. Valuable data is literally being left on the battlefield.
Importance of RF Data in Military Operations
RF signals provide crucial intelligence in a range of areas, including:
- Threat detection: RF receivers can detect enemy radar or communication signals, helping analysts to identify adversary positions and intent.
- SIGINT and EW operations: In Signals Intelligence and Electronic Warfare, analysts can intercept, analyze, and exploit RF signals to reveal adversary communications and other activity. They can map enemy positions and capabilities, while also jamming or deceiving the adversary.
- Command and Control: RF signals provide information that allows leaders to direct forces, synchronize actions, and maintain cross-domain situational awareness.
- Communications in contested environments: When adversaries are trying to jam, intercept, or deceive communications, the electromagnetic spectrum becomes the battlefield, from intercepting enemy transmissions to understanding adversary actions and how quickly they are evolving.
Missed or dropped signals can have direct operational consequences. To ensure reliable access to this mission-critical information, the real-time storage and analysis of RF data is important.
Storage and Latency Challenges
Traditional storage systems struggle to keep up with high-bandwidth RF data streams. Massive throughput and continuous streams will strain the capabilities of conventional systems. Most solutions simply cannot keep pace with the flow of data, putting real-time intelligence capabilities at risk.
Latency issues — the delay between when an RF signal is received and when it is processed or stored. When signals arrive continuously at gigabit per second (Gbps) or even terabit per second (Tbps) rates, high latency can result in dropped samples leading to gaps in critical intelligence. This high-speed real-time ingest requires storage systems that can keep pace. Few systems today can operate at these Tbps rates which is a significant issue in today’s high-speed RF collection architectures. The volume and velocity of the data continues to grow every year as sensors become more advanced and drones can stay on-target for longer periods of time.
The Spectrum Explosion: Sensors and Instantaneous Bandwidth
With sensors capturing these increasingly broad sections of the electromagnetic spectrum, military operations need to capture, store, and analyze more significantly more data than their current antiquated systems can handle. For example, radars can operate across multiple frequency bands (X‑band, S‑band, L‑band). At the same time, we’re seeing massive growth in the IBW of new sensors. Where legacy sensors had IBW in the 10 to 100 MHz range, modern sensors are now working with many GHz, generating hundreds of Gbps of data.
In this environment, high-bandwidth, high-speed capture is essential to effectively record everything the sensor collects. Yet there are practical limitations. All military platforms (e.g., aircraft, naval vessels, and tactical vehicles, autonomous systems) have Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) limitations, making this high-rate, sustained capture even more challenging.
Why Speed Is the Differentiator
In this complex and rapidly expanding RF environment, speed is the key to success. It’s not just about whether you have enough storage, it’s whether you can accurately keep up with the sensor’s data collection stream. Even if there are petabytes of available disk space, if storage systems can only accurately write at 10 Gbps and the sensor is producing 100 Gbps, valuable data will be lost and the ability to analyze what was stored may be impossible.
Insufficient write speeds have real consequences as dropped data equates to missed signals and ultimately to vital intelligence being simply lost. Mission intelligence is now compromised, potentially putting the mission at risk.
Capturing massive RF streams in real time is a unique technical challenge, one that the military must tackle to maintain its battlefield advantage.
Axellio’s Role: Solving High-Speed RF Storage Challenges
With expertise in high-speed, high-volume data storage systems, Axellio helps military leaders to overcome the current challenges around high-speed data ingestion and analysis.
Purpose-built to handle extreme ingest rates and broad-spectrum capture, SensorXpress® simultaneously ingests, stores, and distributes RF signals. The platform maintains full fidelity with no dropped samples – even at the Tbps rates, ensuring analysts can build a complete picture of the RF environment.
With warfighters in mind, the solution is optimized for SWaP-constrained environments —platforms like aircraft, naval vessels, autonomous systems, and tactical pods.
SensorXpress solves the key challenges mentioned above. It preserves the full-spectrum visibility captured by modern sensors, in support of mission-critical decision making. The platform supports real-time analysis, replay, and threat detection, ensuring military leaders can put RF data to work in real-time to support the warfighters.
Conclusion
While electromagnetic spectrum visibility and instantaneous bandwidth have grown dramatically, ingesting, storing, and distributing data for analysis is no longer the challenge.
Without a solution that delivers sufficient accuracy and speed to match today’s high bandwidth sensors, military leaders risk losing critical spectrum intelligence. That puts missions at risk. Axellio and SensorXpress ensure that no data is lost no matter how fast the data is being captured, enabling mission-critical RF intelligence capture, analysis, and decision-making.
