TrellisWare Technologies, Inc., is leading the development of the Military Full Duplex Radio (MFDR). The objective of this effort is to develop a communications system to simultaneously transmit and receive on the same frequency at the same time. The project’s intent is to retain mission effectiveness without time-division and to improve performance in dense spectrum environments.

MFDR combines proven commercial and advanced military technologies to prototype, demonstrate, and deliver two different Single Frequency-Simultaneous Transmit and Receive (SF-STAR) systems; a fixed tactical SF-STAR system and a mobile tactical SF-STAR system. The SF-STAR system targets to have enough self-interference suppression (SIS) without impacting the overall noise figure of the radio. It aims to integrate all components and subsystems from the antenna to the modem processing in a well-coordinated manner to achieve 130-150 dB SIS performance for effective SF-STAR operations.

Agencies equipped with the Military Full Duplex Radio will be able to deploy systems all over the world that need to co-exist with several other systems. MFDR also addresses the spectrum challenges by increasing spectral efficiency to function between 225–2300 MHz in operational environments.

The MFDR project is well under way having successfully completed critical design and preliminary demonstrations of the fixed tactical SF-STAR prototype system for 2019. The program is currently demonstrating a series of field tests where both the fixed and mobile SF-STAR systems operate at various frequency bands. The surrogate system technology is beginning its transition to a more ruggedized enclosure, which will culminate into a TRL 6 field demonstration in its final form factor.