Trazore: a whole country to plan in

We build and test NEMESynth-EMSO on Trazore, a synthetic island nation with the detail of a real one: its terrain, its phone network, its military networks and the threats you'd plan around.

Why the country matters

A spectrum plan answers questions you can only ask about a real place. Which exchange carries the hospital's backhaul? What happens to it when the power goes out? Which links are fiber and which are microwave shots across open water? Who owns the band, and whose sign-off do you need before anyone keys up? Which military nets ride the civil fiber? Where are the radars and SAM sites you have to protect, or stay away from?

On a toy map none of those questions has an answer, so the tool is never really tested. Trazore has an answer for every one of them.

• Terrain and distance. Islands, straits and coastlines decide which links close and which need satellite. Propagation and link budgets run on the real geometry.
• An RF laydown. Assignments by service and station class (base, land mobile, aeronautical ground, fixed, aircraft, navigation) competing for the same bands in the same places.
• A cyber and network laydown. Exchanges, fiber, microwave and satellite backhaul, the carriers that run them, and the military network sharing their fiber. A fault on one shows up as an outage on another.
• Dependencies. An exchange runs off a power control center, and a relief site depends on the exchange. Lose one and the others go with it.
• Threats. Radar and SAM sites with their threat rings, placed where they actually get in the way.
• Authority. A Ministry of Telecommunications that manages the spectrum and speaks for the country at the ITU, provincial carriers, and the armed forces.

What's in Trazore

Take one island: Stros M'Kai

Stros M'Kai is one of the island provinces that held out when the main island fell in 1951, a small place with a streak of independence next to a hostile mainland government. In the data it's a complete small-island comms picture:

• one local exchange, with fiber to Stenkai, Portmore, Herne, Lilandril and the Star City exchange center, and satellite links to Metropolis and Gotham;
• a power control center and electric company the exchange relies on;
• a radar site, a SAM site and an SA-20 site, all inside an SA-10 ring.

Now put a hurricane over it. You have to get frequencies out for relief and safety of life in priority order, work with a host nation that may not play along, and figure out whether a link went quiet because the power's out, because a friendly stepped on it, or because someone's jamming.

The Halcyon exercise

Halcyon is a training hurricane that crosses Trazore from 12 to 15 November. Its SFAFx set holds the whole relief operation: assignments with user priorities, four nets with their PACE plans, the state of the infrastructure, interference events and links, and the decision sheets that say when a net switches and what happens to a degraded assignment's frequency.

You work it from two days before D-day to two weeks after. The storm shows on the weather overlay, and exchanges and links go down and come back as it passes. The PACE board shows where each net is at any hour, and the goals keep relief, safety of life and the host-nation agreement in front of you.

Synthetic names, real tradecraft

Trazore has no real people, places, countries or organizations. Each real-world player is replaced by a stand-in with a synthetic name doing the same job with the same processes and equipment: a joint task force, a UN-style telecom cluster, relief NGOs, commercial carriers, a host-nation ministry. The standards and technical facts are real: JP 3-85, MCEB Pub 7, IEEE 1900.2 and 1900.5.2, ITU emission designators, the bands, the equipment parameters. Someone who has worked Trazore can work the real thing.

Synthetic data is labeled synthetic, and every stand-in says what kind of real organization it represents. Where real data exists we use it: the 124k master reference records go through the same importer.