Military Messaging Interoperability Testing

As a software company (and a server software at that) it's rare that we get to set up test labs with the actual equipment used in the field by some of our end-user customers. It was a nice change therefore to be recently visited by Gary Waddington of Boldon James and Mikko Huttunen and Pekka Puhakainen of SkySweep to do some interoperability testing involving Isode's M-Switch X.400 message switch, Skysweep's STANAG 5066 server and the Safemail.mil email client from Boldon James using radios from Park Air Systems.

David Wilson & Steve Kille (Isode), Mikko Huttunen (SkySweep), 

Gary Waddington (Boldon James), Pekka Puhakainen (SkySweep)

Over the course of two days we demonstrated:

1. STANAG 4406 Annex E messaging over radio using ACP 142 with the Microsoft Outlook based, safemail.mil X.400 mail client from Boldon James and our own M-Switch X.400 product.
2. Data application operation over radio using STANAG 5066 (using the Park Air VHF/UHF Radios and STANAG 5066 servers from SkySweep).

Two existing Isode whitepapaers can be consulted for background information; "Military Messaging over HF Radio and Satellite using STANAG 4406 Annex E" and "STANAG 5066: The Standard for Data Applications over HF Radio".

We showed non-ARQ operation using STANAG 5066 UDOP and ACP  142, and ARQ operation using STANAG 5066 RCOP and Connection Oriented ACP 142. An  overview of the messaging protocols and standards and why they are important in providing an efficient messaging service is given in the Isode whitepaper "Messaging Protocols for HF Radio".