KeyW wins Air Force radio frequency R&D contract

KeyW Corp. wins a five-year, $23.9 million research-and-development contract to help the Air Force identify radio frequency exploitation technology.

KeyW Corp. has won a five-year, $23.9 million contract for research-and-development services to help the Air Force identify new radio frequency exploitation technologies.

Hanover, Md.-based KeyW bested one other proposal for the Research to Advance Comprehensive Exploitation of Radio Frequency contract also dubbed “RACER.”

The Air Force launched RACER in an effort to find new algorithms for approaches to conduct concurrent threat detection, tracking, imaging, classification and identification of targets with both singular and distributed sensor architectures.

A December 2016 broad agency announcement for RACER calls for contractor support to find both evolutionary and revolutionary improvements to both RF sensor exploitation algorithms and other processing functions.

Through RACER, the Air Force also aims to leverage all available information in order to maximize the performance of sensors and exploitation tools. The BAA says information can include spatial diversity, waveform diversity, adaptive transmission and receipt, and signals of opportunity.