DIEGO GARCIA — There are several statements that are true about Diego Garcia. For example, the weather is unpredictable, it may be sunny for a moment and then out of nowhere it is raining. All visitors that arrive on island, whether TDY or passing through, have heard the wonderful fishing stories and look forward to trying their luck at deep sea fishing on the island. However, Diego Garcia is normally the last place on earth you would probably think of when it comes to being equipped with new technology. Except in this case, where Diego Garcia was one of the first sites to be equipped with the newest satellite technology — the Modernization of Enterprise Terminal (MET), AN/GSC-52.
The MET program will replace the aging, bandwidth-limited infrastructure, that includes legacy Ka-band Satellite Transmit and Receive Systems terminals (AN/GSC-39, AN/GSC -70 and AN/FCS-78), which can no longer support Department of Defense SATCOM requirements. With the implementation of the advanced MET systems, DoD can now leverage the vastly increased data throughput capabilities of its constellation of Ka-band Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS).
Personnel from NAVCOMTELSTA Far East Det Diego Garcia, MET, Product Manager Wideband Enterprise Satellite Systems, Tobyhanna Army Depot, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), Information Systems Engineering Command, and Canterra-Parsons Pacific are working hard to ensure the project is a success and that it is completed on schedule in June 2016.
Once the project is complete and commissioned, it will offer the following capabilities:
- Communicate with WGS, legacy military X-band Defense Satellite Communications System satellites, and with commercial satellites, if necessary.
- Transmit and receive X and Ka frequency bands.
- Perform dual-polarization operations in Ka frequency band.
MET also supports the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN), the Non-Classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNET), the Secret IP Router Network (SIPRNET), and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS); and the DoD Net-Centric, Hub-and-Spoke Communications model. The Modernization of Enterprise Terminal can monitor and control as many as six collocated earth terminals from a single control, monitor and alarm unit, and can switch baseband signaling from a single bank of modems to many collocated earth terminals through the use of an L-band switch subsystem.