SIGNALS FROM THE SHORE

“There are no secrets to suc-

cess. It is the result of prepa-

ration, hard work, and learn-

ing from failure.”

— General Colin Powell

In This Issue

• SOSA and VITA

• Jersey Shore Junior

Science Symposium

• Radar Ray Series

• AOC Annual Symposi-

um Call for Papers

SOSA and VITA: Working Together for

Next-Gen Defense Systems By Rodger Hosking, vice president, Pentek, Inc.

Abstract

The SOSATM

(Sensor Open Systems Architecture) Consorti-um is developing common open standards for designing, building, and deploying hardware, software, and firmware components of new military electronic systems. SOSA con-tributing members are U.S. government organizations includ-ing the U.S. DoD, Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as key representatives from industry and universities.

SOSA adopts the most appropriate subsets of existing open standards to form a multi-purpose backbone of building blocks for current and future embedded systems for Radar, EO/IR, SIGINT, EW, and communications.

Objectives include vendor interoperability, lower procurement costs, easier new technology upgrades, quicker reaction to new requirements, and longer life cycles.

Because the emerging SOSA hardware standard draws pri-marily from OpenVPX and other related VITA standards, the new technologies, topologies, and environmental require-ments critical to meeting SOSA objectives must be supported by extensions to these VITA standards.

This article is an overview of the SOSA and VITA organiza-tions and how they interact, along with the challenges, suc-cessful strategies, and illustrative examples.

VITA Background & Mission

Introduced to the market in 1981, the VMEbus architecture began gaining market presence with specification develop-ment and products from Motorola and other early vendors, who formed the VMEbus Manufacturers Group (now VITA) in 1983.

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Association of Old Crows | Garden State Chapter Newsletter May 2020

Continued from page 1

In 1985, VITA (VMEbus International Trade Association) was founded to promote VMEbus in worldwide markets, and pub-lished its first directory of 174 vendor companies and over 2,700 product families. VMEbus soon won widespread acceptance and adoption by defense, government, research, and industrial customers.

The VITA Technical Committee, formed in 1987 to develop doz-ens of new extensions to VMEbus, evolved in 1994 into the pre-sent day VITA Standards Organization (VSO). A year earlier, VITA became an accredited standards development organiza-tion with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

To overcome performance limitations of the parallel bus back-plane of VMEbus, in 2003 VITA introduced the VITA 46 VPX standard to take advantage of new gigabit serial interconnect technology for 3U and 6U boards. In 2010, after widespread use, refinements, and serious interest in VPX for long-term de-fense programs, VITA announced the VITA 65 OpenVPX sys-tem specification, quickly ratified by ANSI.

VITA continues its strong role in promoting and developing open architecture embedded system standards, actively supporting numerous working groups in the VSO, and working with ven-dors and other organizations to embrace new technology and meet new market requirements.

Open Systems Architecture Directive and Initiatives

In May 2013, the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense issued a milestone memo mandating that all acquisition activity must in-corporate DoD Open Systems Architecture (OSA) principles and practices. These include using existing or evolving open standards for well-defined modular hardware and software com-ponents that can be sourced from multiple vendors. Once prov-en, hardware platforms should be reusable for quick-reaction mission needs, feature upgrades, and new technology insertion. Software architectures must be layered and extensible to permit operating system and security upgrades, and to accommodate new applications and user interfaces. These advantages reduce development risks and help ensure significantly longer opera-tional life-cycles.

In response, each of the three primary U.S. service branches (Army, Navy, and Air Force), began developing standards that embraced OSA principles to meet future procurement needs of deployed systems for their respective services.

The Army’s CCDC (Combat Capabilities Development Com-mand) in Aberdeen, MD developed CMOSS (C4ISR/EW Modu-lar Open Suite of Standards). These standards include Open-VPX for hardware, VICTORY to share vehicle services (like time

Garden State Chapter

members are invited and

encouraged to attend the monthly

Board of Directors meeting. If

interested please contact

President Nicole Zaretski

(nicole.zaretski@l3harris.com) for

meeting date & time

information.

and position) for C4ISR/EW interoperability, and MORA (Modular Open RF Architecture) to share antennas and amplifiers. It also us-es REDHAWK and SCA software frameworks.

The Navy’s NAVAIR (Naval Air Systems Command) in Patuxent River, MD created HOST (Hardware Open Systems Technology), which initially focused on embedded processing for airborne and ground vehicle missions. Its major goal of abstracting hardware and software components aligned well with OSA concepts. HOST hard-ware definitions include three tiers: Tier 1 defines the deployed plat-form (airframe, vehicle, UAV, etc.), Tier 2 defines the embedded system enclosure, and Tier 3 the boards, backplanes, modules, and faceplates. Tiers 2 and 3 are subsets of OpenVPX modules and profiles. A registry of Tier 3 products offers an approved catalog of components for sharing across programs.

The Air Force’s OMS (Open Mission Systems) initiative incorpo-rates SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) for commercially devel-oped concepts and middleware, and UCI (Universal Command and Control Interface), which standardizes massages and middleware for sharing command and control mission information between air-borne system elements. OMS strongly embraces FACE (Future Air-borne Capability Environment), a consortium of The Open Group that adopts open software standards for avionics systems, which gained full support of all three armed services.

SOSA Consortium

While each service made significant progress in advancing OSA principles, they did so through different initiatives that often shared common open standards, including OpenVPX and FACE. However, each initiative also included specific mandates tailored for service-specific platform requirements.

After recognizing these facts, administrators within DoD and each of the services perceived a strong need to promote a single, common initiative to define acquisition activities across all three services.

In early 2017, the DoD issued an SBIR solicitation for Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA) Architectural Research outlining the numerous OSA initiatives and objectives for a unified solution. This resulted in the formation of the SOSA Consortium managed by The Open Group, a large organization with strict and well-defined prac-tices, policies, and procedures for standards development efforts.

A primary mandate of the SOSA Consortium is broad participation, commitment, and contribution from DoD, Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as industry, academia, and other government organi-zations. Major objectives include development and adoption of open systems architecture standards for C4ISR to provide a common, multi-purpose backbone for radar, EO/IR, SIGINT, EW and counter-measure systems. Additional objectives include platform affordabil-ity, rapid fielding, re-configurability, new technology insertion, ex-

tended life-cycles, and re-purposing of hardware, firmware, and software.

Inside the SOSA Consortium

The SOSA Consortium Organization consists of two primary groups. The Business Working Group (BWG) defines business and acquisition practices, and creates guidance for acquisition programs. The Technical Working Group (TWG) is responsible for defining the SOSA Architecture, and producing the SOSA Technical Standard and SOSA Reference Design.

The SOSA Architecture presents a modular system structure, with tight integration within modules for encapsulating functionali-ty and behaviors, and yet well-defined interfaces. These modules must be based on open, published standards, with consensus-based influence stakeholders directing the evolution, and a strict conformance validation process. The SOSA Architecture pro-tects IP (intellectual property) within the modules to incentivize innovation and competition.

The SOSA Technical Standard documents the SOSA Architec-ture with detailed rules and requirements drawn and adapted from a collection of open standards. The primary standards de-fining specifications for plug-in cards, backplanes, chassis, elec-trical components, and mechanical structures are VITA stand-ards.

The SOSA Conformance Policy, now being defined by the SOSA Conformance Standing Committee, will define processes for qualifying products against the Technical Standard. They include multiple conformance verification processes, a single conform-ance certification process, and a single SOSA certified conform-

US Air Force

OMS

Open Mission Systems

DoD MOSA OBJECTIVES

US Navy Navair

HOST

Hardware Open

Systems Technology

Tier 1: Airframe

Tier 2: Chassis

Tier 3: Modules

US Army CCDC

CMOSS

C4ISR and EW Modular Open

Systems Suite of Stds

VICTORY - MORA

OpenVPX – VITA 49

JBC - Platform

UCI

FACE - VITA 49

OpenVPX Sub-Set

SOSATM Consortium

Navy, Army, & Air Force

Industry and Universities

formed under The Open Group

Defining Best Standards & Practices

for Open, Modular Defense Systems

Figure 1. After independently developing standards in response to DoD MOSA objectives,

each of the three services joined the SOSA Consortium to develop a unified standard.

ant product registration process. Until the award of certification, no product can claim to be SOSA conformant.

Membership in SOSA is restricted to US citizens and organiza-tions so that DoD-sensitive or classified requirements can be pre-sented by representatives from the armed services to promote solution strategies within the SOSA Technical Standard. For this reason, technical details of on-going discussions in the SOSA Technical Working Group may not be disclosed to the public. Once the standard is approved and released to the public, it will contain only specifications and rules, free from the underlying, sensitive use drivers.

VITA and SOSA

Because VITA is so central to the SOSA hardware definition, many of the same individuals in the SOSA TWG are also active participants in the VITA Standards Organization (VSO). Because restrictions on technical disclosures imposed on the TWG by SO-SA do not apply to VSO, members of VSO must be mindful against referencing on-going SOSA technical topics in their VSO discussions and publications.

Nevertheless, the TWG does release period “snapshots” of the evolving SOSA Technical Standard that are publicly available for review, the latest being Snapshot 2 released in January 2020. While no conformance to these snapshots may be claimed, they illustrate the direction and underlying principles guiding the final standard.

In some cases, SOSA adopts only carefully selected subsets of existing VITA specifications. For example, the TWG adopted only a handful of the more than one hundred 3U and 6U OpenVPX slot and module profiles, based on an analysis that they could accom-modate the majority of system requirements.

User-defined backplane pins defined in OpenVPX pose a neme-sis for standardization efforts because they allow custom assign-ment of signals with interface standards, directions, and voltages. Profiles with user-defined pins are being deprecated in SOSA. In-stead, work is underway to assign a minimum set of specific I/O standards to each group of legacy user-defined pins for each of the OpenVPX control, data, and expansion planes.

SOSA restricts the primary VPX power supplies to +12V only, pro-hibiting +5V, and +3.3V. This greatly simplifies the previous OpenVPX issue of balancing among three voltages to simplify chassis power supplies and standardize the plug-in cards.

Unlike most OpenVPX systems, SOSA requires hardware plat-form management leveraging the HOST 3.0 system management architecture, which itself is highly leveraged from VITA 46.11. A system manager module accesses all SOSA system elements for census taking, health monitoring, trouble shooting, new firmware/software upgrades, and reset/recovery operations.

Backplane I/O for RF signals and optical interfaces in OpenVPX have gained significant traction in CMOSS, MORA, and HOST systems over the last six years, all enabled by VITA 66 and VI-TA 67 specifications. Eliminating front panel cable harnesses wins high scores for maintenance and reliability. Some of the latest modular backplane standards offer extremely high density and even mixed RF/optical interfaces as shown in Figure 2.

In summary, when critical needs arise from SOSA customers (DoD services), SOSA TWG members can promote innovation for new standards within the VSO to accommodate them, while still complying with SOSA restrictions.

Next Steps

The release of the Technical Standard Snapshot 3 is scheduled for early second quarter 2020, but the current public health cri-sis may delay this because of cancellations of face-to-face meetings. Nevertheless, web-based conferencing will augment the regular on-going conference calls to help maintain the mo-mentum.

It is expected that the release of the SOSA Technical Standard 1.0 will be completed about nine months after Snapshot 3. At that point, product vendors may begin the processes leading to full certification.

Nevertheless, vendors are now offering products that were “developed in alignment with SOSA” like the one shown in Fig-ure 3. A key difference in the SOSA architecture from earlier open standards is the well-defined protection of IP, which en-courages numerous examples of supplier innovation and invest-ment.

The DoD is now issuing requests for proposals and information clearly favoring respondents that offer OSA-based solutions. The active participation in SOSA by the DoD, all three armed services, embedded industry vendors, universities, and re-search facilities gives evidence of their substantial commitments of resources and personnel. These clear signals ensure that

Figure 2. Rear view of 3U OpenVPX Module with two VITA 67.3D backplane connectors,

each with 10 coaxial RF signals and 24 optical lanes. Courtesy TE Connectivity

SOSA is well on its way to revolutionize the future of embedded military electronics systems.

Annual Jersey Shore Junior Science Symposium by Gayle Grant, Board Member, AOC GSC

The Association of Old Crows New Jersey Chapter of New Jersey participated in 4th Annual Jersey Shore Junior Science Symposi-um (JSJSS) on March 23-25, 2020. The NJ Chapter provided $2,000 awards to Paper and Poster Presenters. NJ Chapter member Gayle Grant participates on the Executive Chair, tech-nical lead, mentor, and judge. NJ AOC members Sorin Davidovi-ci, Bradley Farnsworth, Tom Kesolits, Tom Newsome, and Joe Zaroff each reviewed and scored paper, mentored students, Sym-posium Technical Paper and Poster judge. A special thanks to you all for your personal support.

The JSJSS was successfully held virtually this year due to Coro-navirus (COVID-19) Pandemic. The JSJSS is a Regional sympo-sia and the five top places participate in the DoD 58th National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium (JSHS) and recog-nize students for their original research achievements in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Spoiler Alert! JSJSS took 1

st Place at the JSHS Computer Science

category, keep reading to find out who!

Eighty-six students from thirteen NJ high schools, submitted their STEM research papers for participation in the JSJSS competition. After an extensive review process, 10 students were chosen to be

Figure 3. Pentek Quartz Model 5550 3U VPX 8 Channel A/D and D/A RFSoC

SOSA-Aligned Processor incorporates RF and optical backplane using VITA

66 or VITA 67 connectors. Top cover removed to show details.

Paper Presenter finalists and 6 were chosen to be Poster Pre-senter finalists. Due to COVID-19, the JSJSS, the normal two-day symposium agenda of the students presenting the results of their research projects live and on stage in the Ocean County College Grunin Theatre to an audience of 400+, including judg-es, was replaced by each student submitting a video of their presentation to the JSJSS Executive Committee. The videos were then posted on-line for access by over 20 JSJSS volun-teer judges. After viewing the presentations on-line, each judge submitted a score of each presentation to the Executive Com-mittee determined the ranking of the 10 Paper Presenters and the 6 Poster Presenters.

The AOC New Jersey Chapter provided $140 to each of the 10 Paper Presenters. The top 5 Paper Presenters were:

1st

– Mr. Ryan Park, Milburn High School, X-Net: A Deep Convolutional Neural Model for X-Ray Threat Detection

2nd

– Mr. Jason Ping, Bergen County Academies, Enabling Personalized Medicine: A Novel Deep Learning Tool for Classifying Genetic Mutations Using Text from Clinical Evidence

3rd

– Ms. Kannammai Pichappan, Bergen County Academies, The Role of Ascorbic Acid in PNS Neurodegenerative Disease

4th

– Ms. Crystal Pan, Toms River High School North, Develop-ment of Polymer Composites Reinforced with Recycled Carbon Fibers

5th

– Mr. Sourish Jasti, Holmdel High School, Wastewater Pu-rification: Fabrication Of A Low-Cost Water Filtration Sys-tem To Remove Heavy Metal Ions In Wastewater Using Waste Tea & Coffee

The top 2 finalists received an invitation from the National JSHS to virtually present their papers and finalists 3, 4 and 5 were in-vited to be poster presenters. The top 3 finalists were also awarded scholarships of $2000, $1500 and $1000 provided by the US Army, Navy and Air Force. Our very own Ryan Park took 1

st Place at the JSHS virtual completion. Jason won a

$12,000 scholarship award for his great work!

The AOC New Jersey Chapter provided $100 to each of the 6 Poster Presenters.

The top 3 Poster Presenters were:

1st - Mr. Arya Tschand, High Technology High School

2nd

- Ms. Sophia Capili, Marine Academy of Technology and Envi-ronmental Science High School

3rd

Tie - Mr. Sam Anchipolovsky, Bergen County Academies and

Mr. Jordan Wang, Bergen County Academies

The AOC New Jersey Chapter provided $50 checks to each of the 6 Poster Presenters.

Pictured left to right in the JSJSS Student Presenters Group Photo are top row: Mr. Jason Ping, Mr. Raehash Shah, Mr. Sourish Jasti, Mr. Edward Kim, Mr. Apollo Lee, Mr. Haocheng (Roger) Yang; middle row: Mr. Maximilian Zhang, Mr. Samuel Anchipolovsky, Mr. Ryan Park, Mr. Jordan Wang, Mr. Arya Tschand; bottom row: Ms. Kannammai Pichappan, Ms. Ju Young Lee, Ms. So-phia Grace Capili, Ms. Jessica Yatvitskiy, and Ms. Crystal Pan.

Radar Ray

April 2020 Amateur Radio, Part Two

In the last Radar Ray I talked about how one can get an amateur radio license that no longer requires a code test. Exams are given locally by amateur radio clubs and the information on the how and where can be found by Googling ARRL.

In this second article I’ll cover some of the fun things and how an amateur radio license and benefit your job. Most all the communi-cations modes were developed and used by amateurs. Exotic modes such as meteor scatter was started by and is still in use by amateurs. Moon bounce and communications with orbiting ama-teur build satellites from several countries is an on-going hobby. The magazine to subscribe to is QST. Just Google it. It has arti-cles addressing all areas of amateur radio, such as antennas, op-erating tips, emergency communications, kit building, reviews of

amateur radios. It recently had an articule using the Raspberry 4 Pi computer. The cost of taking the exam is $15.00 and bring along your driver’s license as you must prove who you are. You don’t have any license, must take the Technician License exam first, then the General and finally the Extra Class. The good news for those over achievers is that you can take all three, one after the other for the single price of $15.00. The license is good for ten years. The General included the technician class privi-leges and the Extra Class has all the amateur privileges.

Amateur radio clubs have “fox hunts” where members team up to direction find the “fox radio” usually beeping on a VHF or UHF channel. Amateurs usually use a small hand held direc-tional antenna. However more exotic systems have been build by amateurs that use doppler processing. This knowledge gives you a leg up on developing EW systems form communications intercept, direction finding and electronic attack. Amateur radio uses databases and with moon bounce and measuring the sun’s solar bursts at 20MHz, what one learns can be applied across all areas, to include radar, databases and satellite com-munications. Amateur radio is the poor man’s communications for many of the world’s non-state enemy players.

Below is a picture of my ham radio shack in our guest bed room. On the left is my 600 watt HF amp, the antenna tuner on top. Just to the right is my power supply and the remote head of my VHF/UHF transceiver. On the computer display is a new digital program running FT8 and I’m transmitting to a small is-land off the cost of Africa. Over to the right is my CW key and then my HF radio. Out of sight to the right is my computer that runs the station. Out of sight to the left is the coax to the anten-nas that go though feed-throughs I bought from Ham Radio Outlet in Delaware.

Regards and 73 from Radar Ray Irwin

Call For Papers Now Open

The 57th Annual AOC International Symposium & Convention theme is "All-Domain Operations - Integrating Across the Spec-trum". The AOC is soliciting unclassified, Distro-A, original papers from Government, Academia, Industry, Operational Units, and Subject Matter Experts that will be presented at the Annual Sym-posium. Papers should focus on awareness of the spectrum, un-derstanding its properties, its role in modern day operations, and the ability to command and control effects and operations within the spectrum to fully strategize, plan, and execute all-domain op-erations.

Paper submissions should focus on the following topic areas:

• ADO Enablers

• ADO Spectrum Awareness (C2/IPB/Awareness)

• Manned-Unmanned Teaming

• ADO Battle Management

• Collaborative EW

• Space EW in ADO

• Directed Energy

To learn more about requested topics, submission formats, and additional requirements, visit:

https://www.crows.org/mpage/2020-CallForPapers

Deadline for Submission of Paper Abstracts: July 31*

Notification of Acceptance: August 31*

*dates are proposed for initial planning purposes only and are subject to change. Actual dates are expected to fall on or within 7 – 10 days of listed dates

Association of Old Crows Garden State Chapter P.O. Box 1167 Eatontown, New Jersey 07724

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Signals from the shore | Association of Old Crows Garden State Chapter

About Us

The Associa-

tion of Old

Crows Gar-

den State

Chapter is a non

profit international

professional asso-

ciation engaged in

the science and

practice of Elec-

tronic Warfare

(EW), information

Operations (IO)

and related disci-

plines.

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Association of Old

Crows Garden

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InfoAge at Camp Evans

The Garden State Chapter of Old Crows is proud to support the events and activities of

the Info Age Science and History Center. Visit their website at http://www.infoage.org/

to see the current schedule of events.