HF meets Big Data – Intercept In An Era of HF Renaissance

In an era of increasingly sophisticated digital attack vectors through cyberspace as well as Electronic Warfare techniques, critical businesses seeking resilient communication are turning to HF. At the same time state actors, seeking to dodge surveillance or needing long-range communication see HF as a low key less monitored channel.

With 90% of HF channels encrypted, it becomes imperative to collect the meta-data, such as location, it’s also just as important to be able to monitor the entire spectrum efficiently as new modems and users join every day with ever more sophisticated frequency hopping techniques designed to foil even the smartest operators signal identification skills.

The processing power of latest FPGA’s and massive storage capacity provides a rich new opportunity to semi-automate the interception process.

With many decades of continuous HF and DF algorithmic knowledge and big data atmospheric comparison tables to leverage, the industry can apply massive real-time computational capacity to the ever-larger intercept data sets and rapidly and efficiently respond to the need to monitor this resurgent communications channel.

In this presentation we will detail specific propagation challenges of HF DF and discuss how big data tech can be applied to make the interception and DF process faster and simpler. We will investigate latest techniques for HF propagation analysis in a DF context, from time of day issues through sun spot activity impacts.

Attendees will receive a refresher of decades of HF and DF accumulated knowledge and be brought right up to date on the latest algorithmic and processing methods that are fundamentally changing the operators role for good.