We are a real product house. We do not just sell labor (if you don't know the true significance of this statement, come back and talk to us after you've worked for one of the many big Defense-Industry body-shops).

The core products today are Aural Cue Generation, Distributed Interactive Radio Simulation, and Digital Communications... with Live Radio Connections thrown in for good measure. These are described in more detail below.

Despite the fact that we sell "products", a large part of our customer base doesn't have the knowledge base or time to understand the complexities of what we do. (What is a multicast address, or IPV6, and why on earth would I need data-protocols synched to 1 microsecond?) Accordingly, we solve our customers' problems by selling complete solutions. That means our Application Engineers spend a lot of time talking to customers helping them understand and define their requirements, sometimes actually going on-site to help with installation or fix problems. Some of these on-site locations are military bases but—because we sell worldwide—others are more exotic foreign destinations.

The ASTi range of product solutions comprise both hardware and software (which is becoming more and more unusual) so our engineers are inevitably exposed to a wide range of disciplines. For instance, the recent change in Civil Airline training requirements means that our product has to incorporate voice recognition, speech synthesis, and pseudo-intelligence.

We are by far the dominant player in our market segment. Many of our customers just refer to the digital communications platform as an "ASTi". And now, with the advent of our latest technology (ACE/Telestra 4) we have the opportunity to expand into several other adjacent digital communication markets. Fortunately, due to the way we are structured, there will be many opportunities for our engineers to define the crucial developments in our core technologies so we can penetrate these new market segments.

Below is a rudimentary description of our products, put in layman's terms. For more detailed descriptions, please take a look at our main website where you will find several gigabytes worth of product information.

In a flight simulator, it is important to present the trainee with all the appropriate aural cues (sounds they hear in their environment and in response to their actions). In fact, around the world different regulatory bodies such as the FAA have extensive regulations regarding the performance of such things as the aural-cue system on a flight simulator.

These cues can be quite sophisticated and since many of them vary dynamically as a function of many parameters, they must be calculated and synthesized in real time. Our product not only produces all the cues, but also provides a toolset that enables us (or a customer) to create the correct library of cues for each and every platform being simulated.

In a nutshell, think of a bunch of advanced video-gamers interacting with each other across the Internet. So now they need to talk to each other, but not just talk... talk realistically as if they were connected by real radios, and subject to range & power effects. Then add in: crypto effects, frequency hopping, co-site interference, jamming, terrain occlusion, and a myriad other intrusions of the real world upon normal radio communications.

Now it starts to get a bit more sophisticated.

Now begin to worry about minimizing bandwidth utilization when you have a training scenario involving several hundred participants all trying to talk on scores of radios. Don't forget about real-world security constraints; you don't want the bad guys to listen in, do you? And last—but not least—keep all this processing on a tight millisecond iteration rate so that there are no intrusive latencies or echo effects.

Piece of cake, right?

Many training scenarios, such as an AWACS platform, require tight connection of several dozen participants (i.e., front and back-end stations, plus instructor positions, plus game players). These real-world platforms are equipped with the most sophisticated radio / communications environments, which—in turn—become even more complex after adding all the extra features inherent in the actual training environment.

In many large-scale exercises, the military needs to bring actual weapons platforms (e.g., ships, tanks, or soldiers in the field) into the simulation. We have a product that ties directly to these radios, and allows their voice-streams to be connected into the virtual world with all the attributes assigned to them for the exercise.

More recently, our product has been used in some special non-training applications to connect personnel on radios in the field to other operators across the Internet. This solution bypasses the inherent range limitations of regular radio communications, as participating personnel may be on radios half a world away.

We believe that this product will also find a market in Homeland Security applications allowing diverse radio systems, such as Police and FEMA, to communicate with each other in emergency situations. It also would provide these emergency response communities with built-in training capabilities in a virtual environment, a valuable consideration since it is rather difficult to conduct such large scale coordinated emergency exercises in the field.