BLUF: At a late February US Army exercise, Rampart again showed the StrataWave UAS radio’s ability to thwart sophisticated detection systems, while also demonstrating new capabilities with our latest, smaller, radio hardware. For the first time in an exercise, we deployed meshing capabilities, unlocking new operational concepts that included enabling mid-flight transfer of UAV control between ground stations, and bridging communications between two parties without line-of-sight to one another. Multiple detection teams, using various systems and locations across flights, confirmed the challenge of identifying the StrataWave signal, underscoring the radio’s inherent resilience in modern contested spectrum conditions. Unlike easily observed and classified signals that quickly trigger reactive jamming systems, StrataWave’s low-detectability and noise-like signature interrupt the adversary’s electronic warfare kill chain, ensuring resilient operations where command and control communications systems fail.
Details:
- Rampart participated in the US Army’s DIESEL 26 exercise at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico from February 23-27, 2026. Rampart flew the new StrataWave V2 radio integrated onto the Overhead Intelligence Goose platform, a group 2 VTOL fixed wing UAS.
- Rampart operated two different ground control stations (GCS) approximately 10km apart, using each at different stages of the exercise to control the Goose UAV. At the largest distance enabled by the test conditions, we maintained a stable link at 15.4km with more than 15dB of link margin.
- Advanced RF systems and SIGINT operators failed to detect or locate the aircraft or GCS at tactical ranges (15km+). Only when the detection systems repositioned to be colocated with our active ground control system were they able to identify the signal, and only after being provided frequency information. Not only did this demonstrate the challenge of observing any of the StrataWave signals, it underscored the advantage of our dual-channel approach, using different frequencies for the uplink to, and downlink from, the UAV.
- While in a 3-node mesh configuration, we demonstrated handoff from one GCS to the other, permitting seamless transition of tactical control of the Goose UAV. This ensures continuous C2 during node transitions and directly supports “leapfrogging” use cases that observers from the 10th Mountain Division identified for scouting use cases.
- While intermittently losing connectivity to nodes physically closest to jammers, other radio nodes successfully maintained a bidirectional link during the comms jamming phase of the exercise. These results were consistent with the radio’s intended use, which is primarily to thwart reactive jamming threats via stealth (vs the static/barrage threats emulated at Diesel) while offering some resilience to direct jamming thanks to its ability to operate at low SNR (and/or SINR, in this case). Frequency availability at DIESEL was extremely restricted, but in a more flexible environment we would have leveraged the radio’s frequency agility (continuously tunable from 250MHz-1.3GHz) to avoid these jamming conditions entirely.
