The U.S. Army conducted a joint exercise with troops from allied nations to test the capability of tactical radios to achieve multinational secure communications through a voice bridge, Defense News reported June 16.Joe Gould writes the U.S. Army Europe’s Joint Multinational Readiness Center hosted the Allied Spirit exercises in Hohenfels, Germany in January to test 12 radio variants attached with a DTech Labs-built tactical voice bridge device, dubbed M3-SE.
The M3-SE ground-based mobile radio is designed to detect and retransmit radio signals while ensuring the same encryption level, Gould reports.
“What we’re trying to get at now is to be able to pick up that microphone, key it and be able to talk from one country to another country’s radio set, and it’s a lot harder than it sounds,” said Col. Adam Loveless, chief of staff at JMRC.
Stacy Ware, director of communications at JMRC and assistant to the chief of staff, told Defense News that troops used the bridge to make artillery support requests.
“When you have a troop in contact, and he’s calling for fire, the old way we did it, he could not get fire on target for at least 30 to 45 minutes,” Ware said.
“So that’s one thing that immediately got improved.â€
At least 2,000 uniformed personnel from the U.S., the Netherlands, Hungary, Canada and the U.K. participated in the event, Gould noted.
