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Case Study

Extreme Remote Connectivity

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Overview

U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) tasked Wes Drake and his team with providing vertical communications for multiple Special Forces organizations operating north of the Brooks Range, Alaska. Working alongside Special Operations Command North, the team was responsible for building a complete communications architecture and infrastructure in an extremely remote area with limited or denied connectivity.

About

Wes Drake served in the United States Army for more than twenty years, twelve of them on Special Operations assignments, where he worked as a Telecommunications Chief deploying a wide range of communications systems. Today he works in the public sector as a Department of Defense Solutions Architect. With deep experience implementing mission-critical communications, Wes is the person teams call when a connectivity challenge needs a solution.

Challenge

The operation presented four distinct challenges.

Remote location. NORTHCOM first needed to determine how the team would communicate, both data and voice, and what equipment could support it. The environment made this difficult: there are seven Native Alaskan tribes north of the Brooks Range, six of them coastal, so there is no practical need for wireless infrastructure across most of the region.

Mobility. One scenario required a team to travel 21 miles to Anaktuvuk Pass, roughly two nautical miles north of the Brooks Range. The team was dropped in by aircraft and met a ground team equipped with snow machines and skis. The entire communication setup had to be carried by a small team across unforgiving terrain in extreme temperatures.

Power. Recharging equipment was a constant problem. These exercises took place in February, so solar charging was not viable. The harder issue was keeping batteries at operational temperatures: a battery that lasts three days at 70°F can last seconds at subzero temperatures.

Extreme cold. In subzero conditions, equipment becomes brittle, and people can only work in the open for about ten minutes at a time. Handling gear outside, such as connecting an antenna, combines poor dexterity with fragile parts, a poor combination when communications are mission-critical.

Essentially, north of the Brooks Range we needed Iridium for reliable communications. This is where the Plum Sat III became an essential piece of our communication architecture. We could leverage wireless in a few areas and swap over to the Iridium push when wireless connectivity was unavailable.
Wes Drake, Public Sector DoD Solutions Architect

Solution

The military plans for alternate paths to success, and the team built its architecture the same way. The Plum Sat III served as the primary messaging equipment, with a router providing a secondary path when available and high-frequency radio and Iridium as a third option. Where wireless connectivity existed, the team used it; where it did not, they switched to the Iridium push through the Plum Sat III.

The Plum Sat III was built for exactly this kind of deployment. It is housed in a military-grade, ruggedized case with six cellular, three wireless, and two GPS antennas molecularly bonded to the case to keep them from breaking. The satellite is fixed inside the case, so the whole system stays protected and portable, which directly addressed the challenge of moving gear across the terrain by hand.

For power, the team used a combination of snow machines, aircraft when available, bartering with local villages, and a portable power station. The creative work was thermal: they heated rice-filled socks and placed them in a cooler with the batteries, and stored smaller batteries and devices close to the body to hold them within operating temperature range. The Plum Sat III’s dual 50,000mAh power banks can run the system for up to 16 hours without recharging, and they can be removed and stored during transport to help keep them at operating temperatures.

To handle the extreme cold, the team used Plum’s external antenna array. This let them keep the Plum Sat III inside a shelter, protected from the environment, while extending the antennas outside, so no one had to handle the core unit in the open.

Outcome

During the exercises, Special Operations Command and NORTHCOM relied heavily on the Plum Sat III and the Iridium satellite network, largely because of the limited satellite takeoff angles that standard military satellite systems require. The team ran two Plum Sat III units for data transmission and used mil-spec high-frequency radios for voice, along with the Digital Tactical Communications System Radio Only (DTCS-RO).