IDEX 2025: Allen Vanguard unveils NXT RF signal processor

Allen Vanguard unveiled a new radio frequency signal processor called NXT at the IDEX 2025 exhibition, which was held in Abu Dhabi from the 17th to the 21st of February 2025. 

The new signal processor is designed to provide the cornerstone of the company’s cyber electromagnetic activities (CEMA) capabilities and help users to process and understand the increasingly complex electromagnetic environment. This has become critical in the past ten years as commercial technologies like 4G and 5G as well as satellite communications and drones, have increasingly found their way into service with militaries around the world. 

At the same time, non-state actors are making greater use of these frequencies and tools, and the civilian sphere is also leaning heavily on them. All of this together makes the job of an electronic warfare specialist much more difficult. It means that some signals can blend into the background noise of civilian communications, making them more difficult to isolate and analyse. The NXT aims to help address some of this challenge. 

It consists of a radio frequency system on module (RF SOM) – essentially a small computer that can handle and process RF signals and an application interface card. The NXT is designed to conduct RF sampling. 

“This means the digital-to-analogue converters and analogue-to-digital converters (ADC) directly produce and sample at the full RF signal range of interest. It moves all RF mixing activities into the digital domain,” a representative of Allen Vanguard told Calibre via email. This has several benefits including a reduced need for radio frequency-specific circuitry, which reduces the space, weight, and power requirements of the NXT, and a reduction in tuning times by 100-fold, the representative said. 

Moreover, this configuration can help deal with that overwhelming noise mentioned above. “Downsampling from the ADC input sample rate (decimation) to a usable bandwidth reduces the amount of observed noise,” the representative said. The unit of measure here is Megasamples Per Second (MSPS). “In the last generation of RF sampling, it would take 250 MSPS but it can now be done with 20 GSPS, which means the noise level may be reduced by 19 dB.” This is not all that the NXT enables, it can also be used to make different RF channels phase coherent, meaning that it can enable beam steering of a radio signal or direction-finding algorithms which are useful for identifying hostile emitters. 

The NXT would not work without antennas, which receive and transmit radio signals. It has four transmit and receive channels, which could mean four antennas per card. “When paired with the interface card it could be directly connected to antennas. The interface card will be the middleware that will give the NXT wider applicability to various defence applications,” the Allen Vanguard representative added. 

Soldiers from the US Expeditionary Cyber Support Detachment, 782nd Military Intelligence Battalion (Cyber), provide offensive cyber operations in support of the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4during a seizure of a town at the National Training Center in 2018. (US Army photo by Capt. Adam Schinder)

The cyber element of CEMA seems to have mixed interpretations, with some holding the belief that it is often used to refer to ‘boutique electronic warfare’ rather than a cyber attack as you might typically think of it – the recent exposure of Russian hackers trying to exploit Signal, for example. The Allen Vanguard did have a perspective, however:   

“The complexity of many modern communication protocols will demand a much more sophisticated approach to inhibition [jamming or disruption] and this, from our perspective, is where we see cyber payloads being leveraged. I.e., where protocol level approaches/exploitations will be needed to corrupt devices whether that is C2 for a drone or the communications encoding for a comms link connected to a nefarious object (IEDs et al),” the representative said. 

Calibre comment

 It is common to compare NATO forces with their adversaries and point to areas that the adversary is dominant in. Electronic warfare and to some extent CEMA more broadly is often one of those. Russia certainly has more EW capabilities in its arsenal than most western forces do individually. The US Army has taken this very seriously with a slew of capability developments designed to reinvigorate its CEMA forces. However, for many, the focus is on using CEMA as a tool to understand rather than degrade an opponent. This might mean that forces lack any ability to jam an adversary’s communications at scale, or conduct the wide area GPS denial that Russia commonly uses to defend its forces from guided munitions and drones.