ACSS (Phoenix, AZ), an L-3 and Thales Company, has developed an ADS-B transponder solution for legacy corporate aircraft, the NXT- 700. This next-generation Mode S transponder will satisfy the DO-260B mandate for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADSB) on many legacy aircraft models and will reduce owner/operator costs, as well as downtime, because it is a “one-quarter ATR short” form-fit installation.

The Hoffer (Elizabeth City, NC) HIT-4U Rate Indicator/Totalizer is being offered with additional options providing the user with enhanced functionality and flexibility in a compact enclosure. The choice of a NEMA 4X enclosure joins the explosion-proof enclosure options and is now available flow meter mounted or remote mounted on a 2” or smaller pipe. The NEMA 4X enclosure offers options for local Modbus access ports via USB port or hardwired access through strain relief for data log retrieval and configuration of the unit.

Connect Tech (Guelph, Ontario) announces Rosie, its latest rugged embedded system, based on the NVIDIA® Jetson™ TX1. Housed in a compact enclosure with optional mounting brackets, Rosie features the NVIDIA Maxwell™ architecture with 236 CUDA cores delivering over 1 TeraFLOPs of performance with a 64-bit ARM A57 CPU.

Unmanned Vehicle Systems (UVS) are reaching new levels of functionality and performance, and it’s not just for air vehicles either. Ground and underwater UVS programs are all taking advantage of the higher-performance computing platforms that are using highly integrated, multicore processors; faster and larger DDR and flash memory; as well as integrated I/O. Additionally, remote I/O subsystems are being implemented to distribute the processing power closer to the sensors and use packetized message passing — with multiple levels of security (MLS) — back to a smaller central vehicle and mission management computer.

The days of proprietary embedded computing systems in military systems are numbered. Proprietary systems, with the attendant vendor lock-in, tend to be platform specific, increasing the development and long-term maintenance costs. New platform: new design. The military has realized that this is an untenable approach.

Eventually, technology advances to the point where solutions that have been “good enough” for decades are no longer “good enough” for the innovations of today. The philosophy of “good enough” is widely applied when developing a new product or solution. Businesses have to make decisions about what new technology features will receive the most attention to keep projects within scope and completed on time.

Aviation safety is a fundamental concern for all stakeholders. The traveling public demands the highest safety standards, but also wants convenience and reliability at a low price with minimal environmental impacts. Taking account of these sometimes competing demands can be challenging.

Using advances in the areas of multi-mode, closely coupled miniaturized radiators and artificially engineered materials, ultra-broadband, highly efficient, electrically small antennas were developed for operation in military communications systems. A low-profile UWB antenna was developed that is composed of two electrically small loops coupled together in their near fields. Each loop has a three-dimensional surface with a bent diamond-arm shape. Half of each loop placed on top of an infinite conducting ground plane is used in the design. Each loop is loaded with a top hat to reduce the lowest frequency of operation of the antenna.

Microwave radiometers measure temperature, water vapor, and cloud ice in the atmosphere, since oxygen and water vapor naturally emit signals in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. These signals are measured at different heights and are used to make 3D images of hurricanes, tropical storms, and thunderstorms. The NanoRacks-Microsized Microwave Atmospheric Satellite (NanoRacks-MicroMAS) measures temperature from molecular oxygen. NanoRacks-MicroMAS is a small, low-cost CubeSat containing a miniaturized microwave scanner that paves the way for future constellations of similar satellites, gathering more detailed, more frequent images of severe weather that impacts people on Earth. NanoRacks CubeSats are delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) already integrated within a NanoRacks CubeSat Deployer (NRCSD).

There are many secret sharing schemes and variations available to hide and reconstruct the given secret. Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme, making use of linear Lagrange interpolation on the dealer-generated polynomial, was used to reconstruct the secret from the stipulated threshold number of participants’ shares. Such a scheme had been widely analyzed by mathematicians and computer scientists for potential weaknesses in the reconstruction of the secret by an external eavesdropper.