Rugged Portable Communication System

Abstract: Todays modern warfare puts high demands on military equipment. Where soldiers are concerned, types of communication equipment such as radios, displays and headsets play a central role. A modern soldier is often required to maintain communication links with other military units. These units can, for example, consist of platoon commanders, headquarters and other soldiers. If the soldier needs to make a report to several units, the message needs to be sent to several radio networks that are connected to these separate units. This multiplicity in turn requires several items of radio equipment connected to the radio network frequencies. Considering all the communication equipment that is used by a modern soldier, the parallel data flow and all the weight a soldier needs to carry, can get quite extensive.  \noindentAt Saab AB it has been proven that a combination of powerful embedded hardware platforms and cross platform software fulfills the communication needs. However, the weight issue still remains as these embedded platforms are quite bulky and hard to carry. In order to increase the portability, a tailored Android application for smaller low-power embedded hardware platform has been developed at Saab AB. Saab AB has also developed a portable analogue interconnection unit for connecting three radios and a headset, the SKE (Sammankopplingsenhet). \noindentSaab AB intends to develop a new product for soldiers, the RPCS (Rugged Portable Communication System), with capacities of running the Android application and combining the audio processing functionality of the SKE. This thesis focuses on developing a hardware platform prototype for the RPCS using Beagleboard. The SKE audio processing functionality is developed as a software application running on the Beagleboard.