The Ministry of Defence has awarded a £12.96 million contract to STS Defence for the production and installation of Integrated UHF SATCOM and EFMTE 4.2 baseline communications equipment on the Royal Navy’s next batch of Type 26 frigates, according to the Contract Award Notice.
The seven-and-a-half-year agreement covers Ships 4 to 8, running from November 2025 to May 2033.
Defence Digital Commercial said the equipment will provide a communications service to support “Information Exchange Requirements (IER) for simultaneous voice and data”, forming part of the core communications suite for the Batch 2 vessels. A voluntary ex-ante transparency notice was issued earlier, signalling the MoD’s intention to confirm STS Defence as the supplier.
The notice explains that STS Defence and SNXP previously designed the bespoke UHF SATCOM 4.2 capability already accredited for use across the Type 26 fleet. The installation on Ship 1 was completed under a competed task, after which Ships 2 and 3 were directly awarded “for Technical Reasons pursuant to Regulation 16(1)(a)(ii) of the DSPCR 2011”. That same reasoning underpins the award for Ships 4 to 8.
According to the MoD, only STS Defence and SNXP possess “the technical ability and experience necessary to produce and install this Integrated UHF SATCOM & EFMTE 4.2 baseline equipment capability… in a manner that is accredited for use by the MoD and meets the required timescales”. The SATCOM design and accreditation process “took several years to complete”, and replacing it with an alternative design would require fresh approvals that could not be achieved within the shipbuilding programme’s schedule.
The department states that contractual timelines for delivering the capability “are already embedded within the existing Type 26 Ship Building Contract (Contract Ref. No. SHIPACQ036) as a requirement to enable repeat supply and fit”. Bringing in another supplier, the notice says, would create “significant and disproportionate additional time and cost consequences”, risk delaying each vessel’s acceptance date and “thereby causing an unacceptable capability gap to the Royal Navy”.