T h e  C o m p a n y

  As  a  S y s t e m  I n t e g r a t o r

CommPower has successfully developed, deployed, and supported turnkey systems since 1985. The capability to design and develop turnkey systems to unique customer requirements and to install, test, train users on, and support these systems throughout their operational lifecycles is directly attributable to the talent and versatility of the staff and to its ability to address the various disciplines of project definition, implementation, and support phases.

Proven practices and procedures for project management, configuration management, and quality control ensure that the requirements are met in a timely fashion and that delivered systems are reliable and supportable.

CommPower has delivered a number of secure message handling systems to government and defense agencies in the U.S. as well as overseas. These systems are typically operated around-the-clock and comprise fully redundant architectures and fail-safe characteristics. CommPower has over the years been able to refine and simplify the man-machine interface and associated hardware and software interactions of such highly reliable and dualized architectures, thereby assuring no loss of messages during fallback switching and failure recovery.

Recent customers of these fail-safe messaging systems include the U.S. Space Command at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, and Marconi Communications in the U.K.

Another major undertaking by CommPower in recent years has been the development, deployment, and support of 120 computerized radio broadcast stations for the National Weather Service (NWS) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The NWS operates a network of VHF radio transmitters supplying local weather forecasts, watches, warnings, and advisories directly to the public in the United States and some areas of the western Pacific and the Caribbean.

The NWS decided to significantly improve their operations, lower their operating costs, and reduce the staffing requirements associated with the radio programming function by acquiring a new system named the Console Replacement System (CRS). CRS, which is a computer-based system with high-quality digitized, synthesized, and concatenated speech capabilities, is capable of automatically performing the manual functions of the replaced legacy station.

CRS is based on a distributed system architecture incorporating loosely coupled PC-based computer systems interconnected by an Ethernet local area network (LAN). The system consists of two major parts – the Operator’s Environment and the Audio Processing & Switching Equipment – and is controlled via a highly intuitive X-windows based graphical man-machine interface and a custom-designed audio control panel of manual controls and status indicators in support of backup live operational mode.

Reliability is assured through redundancy of PC hardware (dual main systems and N+1 front-end systems) and data (file shadowing/mirroring), extensive use of COTS software (Unix, Motif), and careful adherence to operating system, programming language, and interface standards (POSIX, C, and GOSIP). Built-in redundancy eliminates the need for site level shelf spares.

Speech processing is done by independent COTS components. Voice digitization and concatenation are done on the main processors (MPs), voice synthesis on the front-end processors (FEPs), merged and augmented by tone generation and National Weather Radio Specific Area Message Encoder (NWRSAME) codes before transmitter output. The NWRSAME function responsible for computer-controlled frequency shift keying (FSK) modulated data bursts is fully integrated to ensure proper synchronization with voice output.

Maintenance and support of the system over its useful life are simplified by maximum use of common hardware and software components resulting in a minimum number of distinct spare part types and strict compliance with industry standards.

The deployed systems operate throughout the 50 states, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Pacific Territories.

  As  a  S o f t w a r e  P r o d u c t  S u p p l i e r

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