Thales has adapted its dimounted soldier radio – SquadNet – into a vehicle-borne variant to allow mounted troops to communicate with dismounted soldiers during tactical level operations.
“One of our existing customers asked if we could make a vehicle variant,” Thales’ product line manager, Ciaran McCloskey, told Army Technology in an exclusive interview on 12 March 2025.
Thales developed the mounted version over a six month-period based on the requirements of the unnamed end user.
The vehicle-borne system can attach to any bulkhead surface, or fit into a holder: it has a width of 20cm, a height of 10cm, a depth of 6cm, and weighs 250g.
VMRS allows direct solider to vehicle communications such as voice, location and data exchange including target locations. This is a relatively new capability that has been tinkered with in the past, but is only now emerging.
McCloskey described the concept as side-stepping the traditional “fox hole swivel-chair interface,” where an intermediary would have typically managed the exchange between the two siloed networks.
Much like the dismounted SquadNet radio, VMRS has a frequency hopping capability that evades adversarial jamming and other forms of disruption through automated changes in frequency. It can perform up to 150 changes per second; “it’s a completely randomised hop sequence.”
Bowman lingers on
The British Army is still in the process of replacing their legacy tactical communications equipment. At present, the service use the encrypted Enhanced Personal Role Radio (EZPRR), a small transmitter-receiver used exclusively for voice communications over a range of up to 500 metres.
However, this system is one of many radio sets in the Army’s Bowman family of systems, which include HF, VHF and UHF voice and data communications from formation headquarters forward to the combat units.
“I am sure they will be purchasing SATCOM networks, and plugging that in among other enhancements,” McCloskey anticipated. “The UK has started these, and is now looking to see what to replace [its existing radios] with, and how to replace them.”
Currently, the UK Ministry of Defence has been running an 18-month-long framework contract known as the Tactical Radio Sub-Lot (TRS-L) competition, which comes under the Dismounted Situational Awareness, or DSA, programme which itself first emerged in 2021 and was meant to conclude in 2023.
However, the programme has experienced delays due to the Covid pandemic, defence procurement reforms, as well as the government’s risk-aversion.
Thales’ SquadNet radio is in the running among other supliers in the TRS-L framework, and so far the British government have only purchased a limited number of radios for evaluation.
