A new radio from FreeWave Technologies, the IM-E500, is a board-level spread-spectrum digital communications link designed for military applications. Having fielded 300,000 radios, primarily serving as digital communications links to equipment sensors and actuators for industries such as the oil and gas market, FreeWave has combined its experience in designing for reliability in harsh environments with advanced spread-spectrum RF techniques.

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The IM-E500 is capable of 115.2 kbps true throughput and has a range of 20 miles – without amplifiers. That range can be extended through the use of repeaters, and the radio itself is capable as functioning as either a simple repeater or a simultaneous slave and repeater.

The radio achieves this performance with 0.5 W of transmit power and operates within the 2.372 GHz to 2.4 GHz frequency band.

Designed for robust operation, the radio performs frequency hopping at the rate of 100 Hz and provides a 32-bit cycle redundancy check (CRC) with automatic re-transmission. It is also 100% tested to ensure full performance across the industrial temperature range (-40°C to 75°C).

The radio is equipped with a RS-485/RS-232 interface and is intended to enable digital wireless communications on a variety of platforms. These platforms include mature unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems and unmanned ground vehicles as well as emerging unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). In the latter application, the vehicle surfaces to provide wireless communications.

While the concept of the IM-E500 originated as a radio for a defense project being developed by an OEM in the United States, it can also be used for conventional applications in conjunction with other commercialized military technologies, such as GPS-based asset tracking. Through different sequences, this same capability can also be adapted for precision agriculture, allowing farm machinery to navigate fields in carefully controlled paths (± 1 cm) to maximize productivity.

These radios can be daisy-chained together through repeaters for extended range, and a separate software component is available for performing signal diagnostics for the entire wireless network. This might lead to new applications beyond what would be possible with a single RF link, such as a group of roving autonomous vehicles that can hand off mission responsibilities to each other when communicating through a control center.

The list price of the IM-E500 is $2000.