U.S. Marine Corps

The rugged notebooks purchased from Ruggednotebooks.com were used in the UH-1N Command and Control System Demonstration package. This is an advanced command and control system used by the Marine Corps to provide situational awareness to the war fighter in a timely fashion.

In the demonstration platform, there were three notebooks used; two Roughrider II's and one Roughrider III. The Roughrider III had an associated docking station to it. This allowed the capability of installing a video server in the system. This video server captured live FLIR video and was shown and the Roughrider III as well being networked to the other two notebooks.

The Roughrider II were the notebooks that the Operational and Fire Support officers used. These notebooks had military applications installed on them where they could view the battlefield, manipulate data, and view a moving map in order to efficiently command and control the battle. A control application was also installed on these computers to enable the users control the radios that were installed in the system via their notebooks and the Ethernet. Finally, the PCMCIA slots provided by the two notebooks were used as a direct data connection to the radios to accurately transmit and receive situational awareness and map overlays.

The Roughrider III was also used as a common display for the two officers to improve on their decision capabilities of how to handle the battle.

All notebooks handled the shock and vibration of the UH-1N wonderfully and no failures were reported. The notebooks met and exceeded all expectations of the users of this advanced airborne command and control system.

There were, however, two subjective critiques on the notebooks. The displays were not nearly bright enough when the sun shined on them. The demonstration was held out in the desert where it gets very bright during the day. In addition, the mouse pads need to be made less sensitive. When moving in the helicopter with all its vibration, the less sensitive the mouse is the better.

All in all, the Marines were very happy with the performance of the notebooks that were purchased from your company. The fact that the system will be used again by the Marine Corps in experimental exercises in May and June shows that system is success.

Bernie Coski
Communications Systems Section - US Marine Corp.
Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence Branch
Space Systems Development Department