Israel’s Tadiran Communications is introducing its fourth-generation rugged personal digital assistant (RDPA) here at Asian Aerospace.

The RDPA, the TACTER-31M and a number of other Tadiran Com products are used all over the world, including in the U.S. armed forces. The U.S. is the first customer for the RDPA and it has already been chosen for CHS3– stage three of the U.S. armed forces combined hardware software program.

Pniel Fleishman, Tadiran’s deputy vice president for Asia/ Pacific marketing, explained to Aviation International News that the development and design of an RDPA, while seemingly a simple task, is really more complicated than at first glance.

“The reason this is already a fourth-generation RDPA is because the technology and capacity of PDAs in the commercial world is advancing so rapidly. In some cases the technology advances significantly every six months–sometimes even faster. What we are doing– but doing well–is grappling with the challenge of providing the military customer with a model that is close if not identical to the state-of-the-art in the commercial world. For this reason alone, we have to continually update our designs,” Fleishman said.

However, he stressed that this involves a lot more than just taking the shiny, silver-colored case off your PDA and replacing it with a metal camouflaged outer casing. “There are many companies offering supposedly RDPA models, but there are not many that really are prepared to operate in military conditions in the true sense. These units are full of very tiny and sensitive components and they have to be protected in a way that they will survive and be adaptable to all manner of climactic and environmental conditions.”