NNSS Technology Wins an R&D 100 Award
Every year, R&D World holds a competition to determine the year’s top 100 innovative technologies. If you take a look at the 2024 winners (released on the R&D World website on August 8), you’ll find the NNSS on the list!
Doug Seastrand’s Electromagnetic Spectrum Management System, technology that was derived from an SDRD project, won an R&D 100 Award in the IT/Electrical category. The decision was made by an esteemed panel of internationally renowned judges in science and technology.
The R&D 100 Awards competition, nicknamed “the Oscars of innovation,” focuses on new commercial products, technologies, and materials that are available for sale or license and recognizes them for their significance and innovation in the realm of science and technology.
Congratulations to Doug and his team on this prestigious accomplishment! This achievement is a testament to the NNSS’ growing global recognition for its scientific and technical R&D innovations. Read on to learn more about Doug’s Electromagnetic Spectrum Management System and how it originated from a Site-Directed Research and Development (SDRD) project in 2015.
The Electromagnetic Spectrum Management System: From Idea to Commercial Startup
During the last decade, Nevada National Security Sites (NNSS) Senior Principal Engineer Douglas Seastrand and an NNSS team have successfully leveraged project funding from the NNSS SDRD Program to develop patented electromagnetic spectrum management technology. Seastrand worked with Rudolpha “Dolly” Jorgensen, Eric Schmidthuber, Ryan Martin, Sean Sheehan, and Harry Bostick on the Electromagnetic Spectrum Management System (ESMS) project, which developed into two patents for technologies to prevent unwanted radio frequency (RF) communications that are useful to the national security and law enforcement mission spaces. This SDRD project, initially developed in 2015 and patented in 2017, opens the way for possible follow-on work, such as exploring modulation control, inserting new or modified modulation, or providing real-time situational awareness of the RF environment.
The team’s 2015 one-year SDRD project was titled “Concurrent Transceiver with Ultra-high-speed Fourier Transforms for Unrealized SIGINT Applications,” (aka ESMS) and was created to control the RF radio waves propagating through an area. The ESMS system provides a revolutionary approach to controlling RF signals, removing all modulation from every RF signal that is not designated as “friendly,” and optionally replacing it with new modulation—thus preventing (or jamming) and controlling all RF communications. The ESMS system selectively allows friendly RF signals to pass without being jammed—including frequency hopping and spread spectrum communication systems. The ESMS technology can near-simultaneously RX [receive] and TX [transmit] to let friendly communications through while blocking all other/unknown communications. ESMS is able to selectively pass or jam any RF signal within its bandwidth, currently up to 8 Ghz.
Conventional jamming techniques have high power requirements. In contrast, the ESMS efficiently tailors each RF carrier output amplitude relative to the signal strength of its received carrier, and the user can determine the hemispherical area of influence to further limit power. ESMS inherently works will all modulation techniques and requires no foreknowledge of the unwanted carrier frequencies.
The ESMS rapidly alternates between receive (RX) and transmit (TX) in order to digitize the received RF to produce an Instantaneous Spectrum of all RF carriers. This list of carriers is compared with the Friendly Spectrum to remove them from the Managed Spectrum list. The remaining carriers are considered unfriendly, so they are converted back into RF and retransmitted without their original modulation or with new modulation. The area of jamming influence is dependent upon the RF gain of the TX Amplifier.
It was so promising that, in 2021, Seastrand was nominated and accepted as a FedTech Startup Studio Finalist. FedTech connects scientific work done at the government level with public sector, first-time startup entrepreneurs who plan to grow and monetize inventions for the commercial market using government-generated intellectual property. The vetted entrepreneurs gain access to intellectual property information and federal funding and grants, while the NNSS gains recognition for its groundbreaking work that can be used to improve technology on a large scale. Although other NNSS cohorts were invited to compete for FedTech, Seastrand’s invention was the first and only one successfully paired with the correct entrepreneurs, who have since worked with the NNSS to begin the engineering and commercialization of the ESMS product, forming a startup company. Seastrand was involved in helping the newly founded company to understand the technology and identify potential customers. The startup licensee worked with the mission and operations contractor’s (Mission Support and Test Services, LLC [MSTS]) Legal department for licenses to advance the technology from TRL 3 to TRL 6.
Patent Notes: Patent filed on Apr 4, 2016. Patent (# 9,559,803 B2) First Awarded on Jan 31, 2017 and Patent (# 9,794,021 B2) Perfected on Oct 17, 2017. Patent Holders: Douglas Seastrand, Rudolpha “Dolly” Jorgensen, Eric Schmidthuber.