700 Wave Relay nodes at Fort Carson. Real mobility. This is what large-scale tactical networking actually looks like.
Most guys still think tactical comms is about whether one radio can reach another.
Like… “can this radio reach that radio?”
That’s the old way.
Most of you do not care about routing theory. You probable do care when ATAK stops updating, the drone feed disappears, the robot loses link, or your team has to stop moving because comms became the problem.
Modern ops push way more than voice. A platoon can easily have double or triple the number of networked devices — radios, EUDs, ATAK, PLI, drone feeds, ISR video, vehicle systems, robotics, sensors, cameras, and supporting assets. Scale that to company or battalion level and the data load gets heavy fast.
RF is physical. Terrain changes it. Buildings change it. Steel changes it. Ship decks change it. Vehicles turning corners change it. Aircraft movement changes it. Teams moving inside, outside, below decks, or across terrain change it. One radio link is going to break eventually.
That’s why the network matters more than the radio.
Wave Relay turns every node, every MPU5, into a router and relay. More nodes do not choke it — they give it more paths. When the geometry changes, the network finds another route, self-forms and self-heals automatically, no user intervention, and keeps information moving. That’s what it was built for, because nothing in combat stays static.
Flat network means everyone is living in the same network space instead of being chopped into little islands that need gateways and workarounds to talk.
Once everything rides the same network, platforms stop being isolated tools. Vehicles, UAS, sensors, and robots start supporting each other. A drone is not just a feed. A robot is not just a robot. Each one becomes another node, another relay, and another way to move information.
At Fort Carson they stood up a 700-node flat Wave Relay network. Then they added real movement. Groups of 25 nodes went out in vehicles, broke away, rejoined the larger network, and kept pushing PLI, voice, and HD video across multiple hops while the topology kept changing.
You may never run 700 nodes. That’s not the point. Any minor improvements made at this scale roll down to every user, whether they are running five nodes or five hundred. In a congested or contested environment, more paths mean you’re harder to shut down.
In this episode we talk with the team members on the ground including Persistent Systems Co-Founder & CTO Dr. Homer about:
Why scalability and mobility together beat old point-to-point thinking
How the network becomes the nervous system of the battlefield
What multi-hop routing looks like when formations are moving and stretched
SOF Week is underway.
Visit Persistent Systems at Booth 540, Tampa Convention Center, Level 3, to see Wave Relay demos live and talk to the team.
If you’ve ever sat there watching ATAK freeze or a drone feed die while your team waited or even if you learned something new from this video, drop your thoughts below.
What's something you want us to include on the next Max Gain?
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