Live Communication Signal Analytics

Final In-Class Presentation

Team OrcaLink didn’t come to solve a theoretical problem. They came to fix a tactical blind spot — one that affects how soldiers are trained, evaluated, and prepared for combat.

The problem was as practical as it was urgent: Communications Trainers lacked the tools to observe, monitor, and analyze radio traffic during training exercises. This wasn’t a matter of poor performance — it was a matter of inadequate infrastructure. Soldier headsets and trainer equipment were often incompatible, leaving instructors flying blind. That meant feedback came too late, too vague, or not at all.

So the team set out to change that.

Seeing the Real Terrain, Not Just the Signal

From day one, Team OrcaLink made proximity a priority. Their Army sponsor didn’t just back the project — they invited the team to the Joint Multinational Readiness Center (JMRC) in Bavaria, Germany. There, on the ground, Erika Lee and Lanka Diunugala embedded themselves in live training environments to observe how communication actually flowed — or failed to — during high-intensity exercises.

What they saw confirmed their hypotheses, and exposed entirely new ones: misaligned tech, mismatched SOPs, and training environments where instructors were constantly playing catch-up.

Their interviews spanned soldiers, trainers, and technical support staff. They studied the full spectrum of communication infrastructure — from in-ear devices to back-end logging tools. And perhaps most critically, they listened.

“Our sponsor was clear,” Lanka shared. “If you’re not seeing it in the field, you’re missing the whole story. So we made sure we did.”

Adapting in Real Time, Like the Warfighters They’re Supporting

OrcaLink didn’t wait to ship a prototype before learning. Instead, they treated the JMRC site visit like a live stress test of their assumptions. Over two days of back-to-back interviews and immersive observation, they pressure-tested key elements of their MVP and reshaped their problem framing on the fly.

They didn’t just ask what was wrong — they tracked how trainers moved, where they stood during exercises, what devices they defaulted to, and what moments broke the learning flow. The insight wasn’t theoretical; it was kinetic.

By mapping the physical, technical, and interpersonal layers of the comms training environment, OrcaLink developed a systems-level perspective on a problem often treated as a tech gap.

Operators of Another Kind

• Erika Lee, a cognitive science major with a minor in design and a background in biotech, led much of the interface research. Her strength? Translating human friction into system opportunity — and designing tools that don’t just work, but actually make sense under pressure.

• Lanka Diunugala, with roots in data science and a sharp eye for operational detail, helped construct the backend architecture that would make their monitoring platform seamless for instructors, not just engineers.

Together, they formed a team capable of integrating discovery with delivery — technical enough to build, intuitive enough to listen, and ambitious enough to stand up a solution that didn’t yet exist.

What Comes Next

Back at UC San Diego, the team transitioned from fieldwork to refinement. They’re continuing to test modular integrations with ATAK and other Army-used systems. More importantly, they’re pushing for a tool that adapts to the rhythm of real-world training — a tool trainers can trust, not just tolerate.

Whether OrcaLink evolves into a startup, a government handoff, or something else entirely, its origins remain clear: a problem worth solving, a team willing to go where the signal was weakest, and a mission bigger than any classroom.

They didn’t just analyze communications breakdowns. They got proximate enough to fix them.