First Field Deployment: KEEN + Eridan at JIFX

Cellular radio technology is complex, largely due to the diversity of spectrum bands, filtering requirements, and the constantly evolving user equipment (UE) landscape. Furthermore, a base station’s ability to transmit a consistently high-quality signal to UEs—typically distributed across the entire coverage area and often mobile—presents a significant challenge across the three major dimensions of cellular networks: coverage, throughput, and latency. Enter Eridan.

Eridan has launched a completely new all-digital radio that enables frequency agility and delivers improved range performance while maintaining high energy efficiency. Their architecture has resulted in 59 awarded patents, as well as a $36.8M National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) grant, recognizing their Open RAN–focused innovation as one of seven awardees.

For decades, the RAN market has been dominated by a small number of global vendors, and innovation—particularly in radio infrastructure—has been limited. Open RAN promises to change this dynamic, and Eridan is emerging as a prime example of that shift.

Between February 23rd and 25th, we deployed our first Eridan RU on KEEN during several live exercises at the Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) event hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School. The event is intended to “provide an opportunity for technology developers to interact with operational personnel to determine how their technology and ideas may support or enhance USG/DoD capabilities,” according to the event site.

In total, 63 companies participated, showcasing technologies spanning autonomy, networking, sensing, AI, and robotic platforms. JIFX aims to create realistic conditions that test the operational relevance of emerging technologies, making the event less about showcasing interesting technology and more about validating capabilities against real mission needs.

Eridan: Not your typical RU

For decades, Radio Units have been designed for macro carrier networks—fixed towers, abundant grid power, and centralized architecture. That model scales nationally, but it was never built for expeditionary deployments, tactical environments, or rapidly deployable enterprise networks. Eridan takes a fundamentally different approach.

Its Radio Unit is built on a highly efficient, all-digital, AI-ready architecture that enhances wireless performance while reducing power consumption, shrinking physical footprint, and increasing deployment flexibility. In environments where power, space, and mobility matter—whether at a military installation, port, or industrial facility—efficiency becomes operational leverage. Lower energy demand translates into smaller power systems, reduced cooling requirements, and greater endurance in the field.

At the same time, many critical use cases demand that devices and services remain connected anywhere within the coverage area, at all times, and with reliable performance.

This matters financially as well. Industry analyses consistently show that energy represents roughly 20–40% of network operating expenses, with the RAN accounting for the majority of that consumption. In the United States alone, mobile network energy costs total billions of dollars annually. Efficiency at the radio layer is therefore not incremental—it is strategic.

 Eridan’s frequency-agile, all-digital radio design is equally important. Traditional radios are tightly coupled to specific spectrum bands, often requiring different hardware variants or complex reconfiguration to support new frequencies. Eridan enables rapid adaptation across spectrum bands without the friction of hardware swaps.

For federal missions, that means flexibility in contested or shifting spectrum environments. For enterprises, it means future-proofing as CBRS, licensed, shared, and private spectrum strategies continue to evolve.

 JIFX – Range tests back it up!

JIFX provided the first opportunity for us to deploy Eridan’s Radio Unit in combination with Acceleran’s Open RAN–native DU/CU stack on KEEN. The network was configured to provide coverage across the McMillan Airstrip at Camp Roberts, allowing us to validate the integrated system in a real operational environment rather than a controlled lab setup.

In true KEEN fashion, the entire network stack was deployed locally at the edge. The 5G core, DU/CU software stack, and management plane were all hosted on a rugged SNUC EE-3000 series fanless server, with precision timing and switching provided by Fibrolan. Running the full stack locally is a key design principle of KEEN. In austere or contested environments, reliable access to public cloud infrastructure cannot be assumed, and GNSS/GPS timing signals can be degraded or intentionally jammed. By operating the full Open RAN stack at the edge with dedicated timing infrastructure, the network remains self-contained and resilient even when external dependencies are unavailable.

While movement restrictions on base limited the extent of our formal range testing, we were able to comfortably validate connectivity at distances approaching one mile from the base station, and we expect the practical coverage envelope to extend significantly further. For a radio operating at just 1 W of transmit power, that result is notable. What we observed in the field aligns with Eridan’s design philosophy: their all-digital RF architecture improves link efficiency and signal integrity, allowing strong coverage performance without relying on high transmit power levels. Traditional radios often compensate for path loss by increasing output power. Eridan instead focuses on maximizing the efficiency of the signal itself.

The radio’s support for 1024-QAM modulation also contributes to this performance profile. Higher-order modulation schemes allow more bits to be transmitted per symbol when signal conditions permit, increasing spectral efficiency and throughput across the coverage area. Combined with the radio’s digital signal processing architecture, this enables strong bandwidth performance even as the device footprint and power requirements remain relatively small.

Equally important was the software architecture supporting the radio. Acceleran’s DU/CU platform, designed specifically for disaggregated Open RAN deployments, provided the distributed baseband intelligence required to operate the network. The combination of Eridan’s digital RU with Acceleran’s cloud-native DU/CU allowed us to deploy a fully standards-compliant Open RAN stack that was both flexible and easy to configure in the field. The integration worked smoothly throughout the exercise, reinforcing the promise of Open RAN as a practical alternative to traditional monolithic infrastructure.

For defense and critical infrastructure environments, interoperability matters. Being natively Open RAN compliant allows Eridan’s RU to integrate with software stacks like Acceleran’s without vendor lock-in, while the fact that the radio is designed and developed in the United States strengthens supply chain trust for federal deployments.

Looking ahead, we are also excited about what comes next. At MWC Barcelona this week, we were able to preview Eridan’s upcoming 4×4 MIMO radio, scheduled for release later this year. With additional spatial streams and the same digitally controlled RF architecture, the new RU is expected to deliver even greater performance while retaining the ability to rapidly retune and digitally filter across bands without the lengthy hardware filtering cycles common in traditional radios.

For environments where spectrum flexibility, deployment speed, and operational resilience matter, that combination could prove extremely powerful.