In a Request for Information posted on the 20th of December the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate is seeking partners in a Limited Purpose Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA).

“DHS S&T is seeking to evaluate technology solutions that identify, locate and mitigate the impact of jamming of communications and position, navigation and timing systems used by law enforcement and public safety organizations (i.e., GPS, land mobile radio systems [VHF, UHF, 700/800 MHz] and commercial wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi or cellular systems). These technology solutions should make existing public safety communications systems more resilient in the presence of jammers and spectral interference.”

Link to the RFI on FedBizOpps.gov

Editor’s note: We hope that DHS gets some responses, but it doesn’t look like there are a lot of incentives for companies to display their technology.  Under a CRADA companies bear all the cost and have to share intellectual property with the government. Also, this CRADA looks like it is a vetting effort to pick participants in a fairly narrow subsequent exercise focused just on first responders – a very small subset of folks impacted by jamming.  Also the RFI calls for technology that detects and locates jamming, while at the same time making first responder comms more resilient. In our experience, jamming detection and location technologies are much different than those that make receivers more resilient and are often not even made by the same companies.  We wish DHS luck with this and will be interested in seeing how it goes.  DG