Thales unveiled a new vehicle-mounted version of its SquadNet radio on 12 March 2025.
Offering full interoperability with the company’s individual soldier SquadNet radio, the Vehicle Mounted SquadNet Radio (VMSR) provides a secure and reliable voice connection while delivering low-latency blue force tracking between vehicles and troops to prevent fratricide and improve battlefield co-ordination.
Furthermore, VMSR can exchange data such as target locations and images between vehicles and troops, enabling the queuing of vehicle-mounted optics and weapons or retransmission to other platforms to better support dismounted operations.
Having already delivered 18,000 soldier SquadNet radios, mostly to European NATO and NATO partner countries such as Belgium, Austria and Ireland, with 5,000 more radios set to be delivered this year, Thales has already secured a launch customer for the VMSR variant.
With its relatively small footprint of 20×10×6 cm, the VMSR system does not require mounting in a standard vehicle radio rack and can instead be mounted on a bulkhead or even behind a seat, allowing even smaller tactical vehicles to easily accommodate the system.
Operating in the frequency bands 431-470MHz or 865-880MHz, VMSR uses standard waveforms and employs frequency hopping to minimise interception, while the system’s narrow bandwidth and ability to transfer data rather than relying on voice communications further reduces the likelihood of interception and location identification by hostile forces.
Speaking to ESD in advance of the VMSR launch, Ciaran McCloskey, Thales UK’s product line manager for tactical products, explained that, while previous attempts have been made to network dismounted soldiers with vehicles, “it’s not quite got there in making sure that the dismounted soldiers and the vehicles are completely seamlessly connected”: a situation that VMSR directly addresses.
As a decentralised mobile ad hoc network (MANET) system, SquadNet allows data to traverse the radio network by ‘hopping’ from one network node to another until it reaches its destination. McCloskey noted that the range of a radio system depends on the environment in which it is being operated. The maximum demonstrated range of a SquadNet system, he said, was 20 km, achieved during tests between the UK’s south coast and the Isle of Wight. The typical range achieved on the British Army’s Salisbury Palin exercise area, McCloskey added, was around 6 km from one soldier to another, while in a heavy forest area or urban environment this could be reduced to around 1 km. However, a VMSR mounted in a vehicle acts as an ‘advantage node’, where even the relatively modest elevation derived from mounting the system in a vehicle increases the range at which soldier SquadNet radios can be effective.
McCloskey further added that, while MANET networking “can be very obvious on the spectrum and can be very power hungry, we’ve kept SquadNet to be mean and lean, but yet give you the digital services for the dismounted soldier”.
Explaining the utility of the system, McCloskey outlined the kind of tactical situations where VMSN would come into play.
“If a soldier has spotted a target with their laser rangefinder and they don’t have the weapon to engage that target, they can immediately pass that target through the digital data that SquadNet provides to the vehicle, and the vehicle might have a bigger weapon or better sights,” he explained. “The vehicles are quite clever nowadays because you’ve got other radio solutions in the vehicle, so you can relay it back over that – could be satcom [satellite communications], HF, long-range VHF. And also the digital data that’s in there, whether it’s targeting information or location information, that can also be relayed or it can be viewed locally in the vehicle.
“If it’s more of maybe a forward observation team that’s moved forward, they can move forward with the SquadNet radios, gather the information, pass that back to the vehicle, which could be two or three kilometres sat back from them, and then rebroadcast that,” McCloskey added.
