Barco receives follow-on orders from General Atomics Aeronautical Systems for rugged displays used in Predator-series UAS ground control stations

Over the last six months, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) has continued follow-on orders for 300 TL-248 flat LCD displays for use in Predator Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Ground Control Stations (GCS), ensuring the ongoing deployment of intelligence and superior operational performance in key defense applications where ruggedization is required.

Visualization pioneer Barco Federal Systems announced today that since January 2010, it has been receiving follow-on orders from General Atomics Aeronautical Systems for its rugged TL-248 19-inch flat panel displays used in legacy Predator-series UAS GCS. Barco has supplied displays to GA-ASI for this critical defense program since 1989, marking a more than 20-year relationship with the company in an industry where precision-quality, reliability, and service are paramount, considering the vast commoditization of military products.

The TL-248 features a first-class 19-inch Active Matrix Liquid Crystal Display (AMLCD) offering excellent brightness, crispness, contrast, and viewing angle in an extremely rugged, yet thin, lightweight package. Barco's most rugged version is designed as a fully enclosed, drip-proof unit and includes a front-bonded optical stack and integrated heater to withstand sub-zero temperatures. Each GCS employs four TL-248 displays in two top-down configurations, one each for the pilot and co-pilot. The pilot controls and monitors the UAS' operation while the co-pilot views reconnaissance data gathered from the live video feeds captured by aircraft's nose-mounted camera.

Barco has worked with customers and partners for more than 20 years to meet the needs of an ever-changing battlefield, leveraging this experience to design and manufacture displays, image processing, and computing solutions for the most complex requirements. In the UAS arena, to achieve information superiority, GCS' increasingly rely on high-resolution, near real-time imagery captured by a variety of unmanned sources. Barco has led the UAS market with rugged display solutions over the past decade, seamlessly transitioning customers from CRT technology through two generations of flat panel LCD displays that offer fully qualified ruggedization, extreme compactness, and superior image quality for sensor payload operators - an ideal combination for real-time UAS operations.

"Our 20-year relationship with General Atomics Aeronautical Systems is a testament to Barco's ability to provide a consistently high level of quality while maintaining the exact form-fit-function specs required of GCS displays and components," commented Ron Farine, VP of Sales, Barco Federal Systems. "We are honored that GA-ASI has chosen Barco for its legacy GCS mission-critical applications and take pride in our responsibility to help protect our country's national security through our contributions in the field."