Missile range supports testing using 1,200-mile fiber network

WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M. -- Travel to the edges of this 3,200-square mile Army installation and you see nothing more than a vast tract of flat desert, punctuated by the stark peaks of the San Andres Mountains. Bereft of any infrastructure, it is an ideal place to test rockets, its mission since Feb. 20, 1945.

But testing any kind of military equipment requires the acquisition of gigabytes of data in real time, said John Medina, the chief of the transmission and data sciences directorate here.

To collect that all that data, the range's test directors in the mid-1990s began installing a fiber-optic network, which now provides broadband connectivity throughout much of this base, a roughly 100-mile-by-40-mile box that runs from just south of San Antonio, N.M., to Las Cruces, Medina said.

The 10-gigabit fiber network -- which has a throughput of roughly eight times the speed of, say, the Verizion FIOS network serving suburban Washington - - today runs 1,200 miles, supplemented by another 1,900 miles of copper cabling. It's enough wire, he said, to stretch from coast to coast.

This network connects 16 buildings scattered around the range to run tests and another 26 equipment shelters, which also can be used for support when required, according to Medina. The network feeds test data into the range control complex at the base's headquarters located 20 miles east of Las Cruces and 45 miles north of El Paso, Texas.

A staff of 33 manages the network, which also connects some 3,000 instrument sites -- cameras, radars and GPS receivers into the control complex and for tests in truly remote areas. The network also has 300 fiber pods positioned throughout the installation, Medina said. These remote access points allow a test crew -- if it has the proper authorization -- to jack into the network, and then connect computers and instruments over a local area network.

The range comprises nine missile launch complexes, including a Navy facility known as the "desert ship," electronic equipment test ranges and Air Force bombing ranges. Instruments that support these tests include two phased array radars that can track 40 objects at a time, even objects as small as a six-inch sphere at a distance of 75 miles.

In addition, the range uses cameras to monitor tests, including a mobile system that can mount up to six cameras and a telemetry system that together collect data from instruments mounted on missiles and bombs.

Information from all these instruments is relayed via the network to the control complex, where the data are correlated to provide a 3-D display, Medina said. Test data are archived and copied onto storage media for test customers, he added.

This June, the Army's Program Office Integration will start a two-year Network Integration Evaluation Test of advanced tactical communications here for a battlefield system that Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli considers the service's top modernization priority.

Those exercises will span the entire length of the range, including remote mountain sites, said Al Ramirez, test director for network integration at White Sands. Those exercises, he added, will be supported by the unseen network that covers the test area.

Medina said that on the surface, this installation might look "like a whole lot of nothing," but buried underneath it is a network as good as or better than anything in the state.