BAE Systems’ and Sierra Nevada Corporation’s open architecture signals intelligence technology selected for the first phase of a U.S. Air Force program

The U.S. Air Force has awarded the BAE Systems-Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) team a contract to provide a prototype design for the next-generation open architecture signals intelligence (SIGINT) technology under its Global High-altitude Open-system Sensor Technology (GHOST) program. The award continues BAE Systems, Inc.’s development efforts to provide full-spectrum awareness and actionable intelligence with a SIGINT sensor design.

“Our SIGINT technology is one of the few on the market designed from the start with open architecture,” said David Logan, vice president and general manager of C4ISR Systems at BAE Systems. “We worked closely with the customer community to design our solution in this way – giving the U.S. Air Force the ability to easily add new capabilities in the future to counter evolving threats.”

Under the contract, awarded earlier this year, the team will provide a sensor prototype that gives insight into adversaries’ actions by collecting and analyzing electronic signals. It will exploit the radio frequency (RF) spectrum, critical to battlefield superiority, to detect, identify, locate, and track RF emissions.

BAE Systems offers a range of adaptive signals intelligence products that allow the warfighter to address emerging and dynamic threats across all phases and domains of battle. The company has more than 20 years of experience developing software-defined open architecture SIGINT systems, and our customers have logged more than 100,000 operational hours on our systems. The BAE Systems portion of the development work for this contract will take place at its facility in Hudson, N.H.

SNC pioneers scalable open-architecture SIGINT solutions for airborne, ground, and maritime applications and is a world leader in Electronic Intelligence. SNC will perform GHOST work in Folsom, Calif., San Antonio, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.