Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) is a cordless telephony standard maintained by ETSI. It originated in Europe, where it is the common standard, replacing earlier standards, such as CT1 and CT2. Since the DECT-2020 standard onwards, it also includes IoT communication.
In digital radio, packet radio is the application of packet switching techniques to digital radio communications. Packet radio uses a packet switching protocol as opposed to circuit switching or message switching protocols to transmit digital data via a radio communication link.
Digital Radio Mondiale is a set of digital audio broadcasting technologies designed to work over the bands currently used for analogue radio broadcasting including AM broadcasting—particularly shortwave—and FM broadcasting. DRM is more spectrally efficient than AM and FM, allowing more stations, at higher quality, into a given amount of bandwidth, using xHE-AAC audio coding format. Various other MPEG-4 codecs and Opus are also compatible, but the standard now specifies xHE-AAC.
Terrestrial Trunked Radio, a European standard for a trunked radio system, is a professional mobile radio and two-way transceiver specification. TETRA was specifically designed for use by government agencies, emergency services, for public safety networks, rail transport staff for train radios, transport services and the military. TETRA is the European version of trunked radio, similar to Project 25.
IS-54 and IS-136 are second-generation (2G) mobile phone systems, known as Digital AMPS (D-AMPS), and most often referred to as TDMA, are a further development of the North American 1G mobile system Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS). It was once prevalent throughout the Americas, particularly in the United States and Canada since the first commercial network was deployed in 1993. D-AMPS is considered end-of-life, and existing networks have mostly been replaced by GSM/GPRS or CDMA2000 technologies.
STU-III is a family of secure telephones introduced in 1987 by the NSA for use by the United States government, its contractors, and its allies. STU-III desk units look much like typical office telephones, plug into a standard telephone wall jack and can make calls to any ordinary phone user. When a call is placed to another STU-III unit that is properly set up, one caller can ask the other to initiate secure transmission. They then press a button on their telephones and, after a 15-second delay, their call is encrypted to prevent eavesdropping. There are portable and militarized versions and most STU-IIIs contained an internal modem and RS-232 port for data and fax transmission. Vendors were AT&T, RCA and Motorola.
Project 25 is a suite of standards for interoperable digital two-way radio products. P25 was developed by public safety professionals in North America and has gained acceptance for public safety, security, public service, and commercial applications worldwide. P25 radios are a direct replacement for analog UHF radios, adding the ability to transfer data as well as voice for more natural implementations of encryption and text messaging. P25 radios are commonly implemented by dispatch organizations, such as police, fire, ambulance and emergency rescue service, using vehicle-mounted radios combined with repeaters and handheld walkie-talkie use.
The National Security Agency took over responsibility for all US government encryption systems when it was formed in 1952. The technical details of most NSA-approved systems are still classified, but much more about its early systems have become known and its most modern systems share at least some features with commercial products.
The Secure Communications Interoperability Protocol (SCIP) is a US standard for secure voice and data communication, for circuit-switched one-to-one connections, not packet-switched networks. SCIP derived from the US Government Future Narrowband Digital Terminal (FNBDT) project. SCIP supports a number of different modes, including national and multinational modes which employ different cryptography. Many nations and industries develop SCIP devices to support the multinational and national modes of SCIP.
VINSON is a family of voice encryption devices used by U.S. and allied military and law enforcement, based on the NSA's classified Suite A SAVILLE encryption algorithm and 16 kbit/s CVSD audio compression. It replaces the Vietnam War-era NESTOR (KY-8/KY-28|28/KY-38|38) family.
SAVILLE is a classified NSA Type 1 encryption algorithm, developed in the late 1960s, jointly by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the UK and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US. It is used broadly, often for voice encryption, and implemented in many encryption devices.
Secure voice is a term in cryptography for the encryption of voice communication over a range of communication types such as radio, telephone or IP.
ASTRO 25 is a generation of ASTRO digital two-way radio communications by Motorola Solutions. Motorola first introduced digital two-way radio in the U.S. in 1991 under the name ASTRO Digital Solutions.
The AN/PRC-152 Multiband Handheld Radio, is a portable, compact, tactical software-defined combat-net radio manufactured by Harris Corporation. It is compliant without waivers to the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) Software Communications Architecture (SCA). It has received NSA certification for the transmission of Top Secret data.
The AN/PRC-150(C) Falcon II Manpack Radio, is a tactical HF-SSB/ VHF-FM manpack radio manufactured by Harris Corporation. It holds an NSA certification for Type 1 encryption. The PRC-150 is the manpack HF radio for the Harris Falcon II family of radios, introduced in the early 2000s.
The AN/PRC-153 is the Joint Electronics Type Designation System designation for the US military version of the Motorola XTS-2500i secure handheld 2-way radio, known as the Integrated, Intra-Squad Radio (IISR) within the US Marine Corps. Its intended purpose is squad-level communications during urban warfare. The USMC ordered 60,000 radios to be used until replaced by the more complex Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) cluster 5 spiral 2 radio in 2013. However, JTRS was cancelled in October 2011, and thus the PRC-153 continues to serve. The IISR is a Motorola XTS 2500i with embedded encryption module to provide secure voice communications. The embedded encryption module is identical to that of the commercially available XTS 2500 modules, and supports DES and AES encryption algorithms. As such, it is not classified as a Controlled Cryptographic Item (CCI).
The Advanced Narrowband Digital Voice Terminal (ANDVT) is a secure voice terminal for low bandwidth secure voice communications throughout the U.S. Department of Defense. Devices in the ANDVT family include the AN/USC-43 Tactical Terminal (TACTERM), the KY-99A Miniaturized Terminal (MINTERM), and the KY-100 Airborne Terminal (AIRTERM). ANDVT uses LPC-10 voice compression.
NXDN stands for Next Generation Digital Narrowband, and is an open standard for public land mobile radio systems; that is, systems of two-way radios (transceivers) for bidirectional person-to-person voice communication. It was developed jointly by Icom Incorporated and Kenwood Corporation as an advanced digital system using FSK modulation that supports encrypted transmission and data as well as voice transmission. Like other land mobile systems, NXDN systems use the VHF and UHF frequency bands. It is also used as a niche mode in amateur radio.
Digital mobile radio (DMR) is a digital radio standard for voice and data transmission in non-public radio networks. It was created by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and is designed to be low-cost and easy to use. DMR, along with P25 phase II and NXDN are the main competitor technologies in achieving 6.25 kHz equivalent bandwidth using the proprietary AMBE+2 vocoder. DMR and P25 II both use two-slot TDMA in a 12.5 kHz channel, while NXDN uses discrete 6.25 kHz channels using frequency division and TETRA uses a four-slot TDMA in a 25 kHz channel.
The White House Communications Agency Roadrunner vehicle is an element of every American presidential motorcade. It is also known as the MC2V. The vehicle serves as the communications hub for the motorcade by encrypting duplex radio and streaming video which in turn is beamed up to a military satellite which in turn beams that data back down to a ground entry point and through to the WHCA switchboard.
