Discussing spectrum dominance challenges with Rohde’s Tim Fountain at DSEI
StorySeptember 11, 2025
LONDON -- DSEI UK 2025. Achieving dominance in the spectrum domain is getting more complex as adversarial threats continue to improve their jamming techniques. Innovative RF and microwave solutions are needed to win at the edge in the EMS domain. This week, I sat down with Tim Fountain, Head of Aerospace & Defense Test Market Segment, Rohde & Schwarz, at his booth (S8-240) at DSEI UK 2025 in London.
Tim Fountain, Head of Aerospace & Defense Test Market Segment, Rohde & Schwarz
McHALE: What does spectrum dominance mean to you, and how can the industry help the Department of Defense (DoD) achieve it?
FOUNTAIN: I think spectrum dominance is all about giving customers the ability to maneuver in the spectrum so that they understand what the challenges are. They can model them, whether it's interference, jamming, whatever, and then use that to mitigate in the real world.
Specifically, what I've been working a lot on is environmental simulation. We simulate the whole environment to the point that it is realistic enough for a customer to run a scenario, an operational viewpoint, whatever it might be, with the intention of actually being able to model what's going to happen in the real world.
McHALE: What requirements are you seeing from defense integrators for achieving electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) dominance? What problems are they looking to solve?
FOUNTAIN: The main one is to create very realistic scenarios that are representative of what they're going to see. Another thing is extremely wide bandwidth threats. In the past we were talking 160 to 300 MHz of interference. Now we're talking about interference that could potentially be two to four GHz in bandwidth. The other one is frequency-agile threats, where no one sits at the same frequency for very long, and they're jumping around and being able to track across a very wide bandwidth. Some of these hoppers are extremely wide bandwidth.
McHALE: Last question, what are the disruptive technologies – RF and signal processing designs – being leveraged to enable spectrum dominance?
FOUNTAIN: The first challenge is to understand what the spectrum looks like, and what the real threat is, and then how to mitigate it. We've seen in Ukraine, for instance, it's got to the point where they've given up trying to use the RF spectrum. You've probably seen these pictures from Ukraine, of the battlefield just draped with fiber-optic cables; Ukrainians have gone to fiber-optic links for their real-time first-person view, because they just don't have any RF bandwidth that isn't being completely jammed.
The goal of trying to dominate the spectrum [means dealing with] your adversary also jamming you. [In this regard] a challenge is adaptive nulling – nulling or jamming in a particular direction – and using beamforming to understand the threats.
Everyone also talks about AI [artificial intelligence] and how AI is for everything. But for us, we see customers using AI to understand what the threat is at that point in time and then order them. So what's my most lethal RF threat or emitter? What's my next most lethal? So, basically ordering in real time, and that's where we see AI really doing an amazing job.
