Coffee and pie: locals play key role on jitters radio system.

Whether it goes to Afghanistan, the western Pacific or the North Pole, the next-generation Defense Department radio system will have San Diegans' fingerprints all over it.

Government officials and private contractors in San Diego are working to put the Joint Tactical Radio System into the hands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines as soon as 2010. The Department of Defense office heading up the whole effort is on Naval Base Point Loma.

The $37 billion electronics project conjures up an image of coffee and pie. Coffee because the project is abbreviated JTRS, pronounced "jitters." Pie because the project is carved into five huge pieces.

The government on March 28 awarded a $766 million contract covering one of the five pieces to a team led by Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin Corp.

The deal covers early work (or system development and demonstration) on a product line known as AMF, for airborne, maritime and fixed stations. The radios will go aboard Army helicopters, Air Force cargo planes and Navy ships. They will also go on the Predator and Global Hawk drones, which are both engineered in San Diego. Predator is manufactured here.

The radios will allow voice and data communications. They will be software-defined radios, meaning that many functions previously performed by hardware--such as amplification or modulation--will be accomplished using software.

It is clear that San Diegans from the private sector will work on AMF JTRS. It's not clear how many locals the project will employ.

Lockheed Martin will have 60 people on the project, with 30-35 in San Diego, says Tierney Helmers, a company spokeswoman who's based in Minnesota.

Lockheed's subcontractors for the project are BAE Systems plc, General Dynamics Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp. and Raytheon Co.--which all have San Diego offices.

News that the Lockheed team won the contract was warmly received at Northrop Grumman's Mission Systems Sector in Carmel Mountain Ranch, says local spokeswoman Sudi Bruni. Details of Northrop's participation were not available by last week's deadline.

The government embarked on the JTRS program in 1997 and restructured it in 2005. Defense Department officials have since been working to consolidate all JTRS program offices in San Diego, says Steven Davis, a locally based spokesman for the program office.

The program executive office for JTRS employs 50 military personnel, 160 government employees and 240 support contractors. Most are in San Diego.

Leading the program is Dennis Bauman, who has been involved with the local Navy labs since 1980. At the same time, he served on the UC San Diego engineering and computer science faculty, holding that job for two decades.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated the cost of the entire JTRS program will be $37 billion.