James Spriet
EW/ISR SME | Strategy & Comms Manager
Warfare today runs on data. Every aircraft, boat, ground vehicle, UAS, EW payload, test article and range asset is producing more information than any operator can watch in real time. Everyone talks about networks, about the cloud, about connected kill webs. All of that is great until the link drops.
Because the link always drops.
Satcom gets stepped on. Line of sight breaks. A platform goes low or masked. A ship rolls in heavy seas. Someone lights up the spectrum, and the smart network you paid for is now fighting for its life. At that point, the only information that still matters is what you were able to capture at the edge before the pipe went away.
That is where Ampex sits. We are the last recorder before the cloud.
People like to think of data recording as storage. As something you buy at the end of the integration cycle. As a line item. That view is wrong. At the tactical edge, recording is not storage. Recording is survival. If you do not capture what the sensors saw in the moment, then for the rest of the program, you are guessing.
Here is the real problem no one wants to say out loud. A program can survive a failed test event. A program cannot survive a failed test event with no data. If the aircraft departs controlled flight and you do not have the high-rate data, the analog taps, the bus traffic, the RF environment, and the mission computer messages, then the answer to the only question that matters, which is what happened, becomes we do not know. That is how schedules slip. That is how money freezes. That is how people lose confidence. Not because something broke. Because no one could prove why it broke.
That is what our recorders prevent. They sit on the aircraft or ship or vehicle and capture the reality of the mission in the exact second it happens. Not later in the lab. Not when the platform lands. Not when the network is good again. In contact. In the dirt. In the clutter. In the EMI. In the heat. In the vibration. In the RF mess that everyone in this industry knows is the real operating environment.
This is the part people overlook. Every AI concept, every autonomy demo, every digital twin, every closed-loop test range architecture depends on one thing. High fidelity, real-world, uncorrupted edge data. Simulators cannot provide that. PowerPoint cannot provide that. The cloud cannot provide that once the link is gone. Only a recorder that was there can provide that. If you want your AI to work on a Wednesday over the Pacific the same way it worked on a Tuesday in a clean lab, you have to feed it the actual dirt that sensors see in the field. Our systems collect that dirt.
So when we say last recorder before the cloud, what we mean is this. There is a point in every mission profile where connectivity becomes a nice-to-have and not a guarantee. There is a point where the platform must be self-reliant. There is a point where data must be captured, time aligned, secured, and preserved on board with no help from shore or from higher. That point is what we build for.
We build for aircraft that pull. We build for naval platforms where SWaP is tight and you cannot babysit gear. We build for ISR missions where the sensor stack overwhelms the network. We build for EW operations where someone is actively trying to blind you. Our systems keep recording. Our systems keep holding the truth.
Truth is the real product here. Not terabytes. Not throughput numbers. Truth. The recorder is the only system on the platform that cannot be allowed to lie. If the sensors said it, it has to be in the file. If the vehicle saw it, it has to be in the file. If the RF picture changed, it has to be in the file. That file becomes the single source for debrief, for fault isolation, for retraining, for incident investigation, for safety, for certification, for litigation, for the next mission kit, and for whatever AI you are trying to field next year. If that file does not exist, nothing else matters.
Here is what this looks like in practice. A flight test over the range sees a transient that no one expected. The event is too fast for the human eye, and the pilot is busy. The telemetry link is saturated. The range does not see the whole packet. The Ampex unit on board does. It captures the full rate signal, the bus messages, the time tags, and the system state. That single capture lets engineering replay the event, fix the configuration, and run again without grounding the fleet. That is mission insurance.
Another example. An ISR platform is running a dense sensor load in a contested spectrum. The backhaul is intermittent. The onboard Ampex system records everything locally and pushes prioritized segments when the link is available. Command does not lose the picture. The mission does not lose the original RF environment. The training pipeline now has real data, not synthetics. That is AI fuel.
Final example. A naval UxV swarm is deployed from a mothership. The mothership loses connectivity to several nodes. Each of those nodes still records all sensor and payload traffic locally on ruggedized storage. When the swarm returns, the commander now has a complete mission history from every vehicle, including the ones that were cut off. That is kill chain continuity.
All of this is why we do not talk about our systems like appliances. We talk about them like the memory of the mission. You can rebuild hardware. You can swap sensors. You can reflash firmware. You cannot recreate data that was never recorded.
So here is the line.
If the network holds, great. Push to cloud. Push to ground. Push to the enterprise. Let the server farms process it.
If the network fails, Ampex keeps the truth.
For more than 80 years, the Department of Defense has trusted Ampex to capture what really happened. Today, we capture, process, store, host, and secure mission data across EW, ISR, mission systems, EO/IR, flight test, high-speed bus traffic, and platform prognostic and health data. If the platform produces it, we can keep it. If the commander needs it, we can protect it.
That is what Excellence at the Edge looks like.
That is the last recorder before the cloud.