Globalisation, coupled with the accessibility of the Internet in the modern world, can result in things meaning very different things to different people. Common terms can be misused too; we have seen some very interesting interpretations of meanings in our various lifetimes! We have decided to put a lexicon on the website so we can keep the pages tight to the usually defined and abbreviated form. Apologies if that makes them a little awkward to read. Rather than a straight glossary, herein is a lexicon to aid better the background as often a little more context is needed in this highly specialist field and easily stated, yet difficult to actually do set of technologies and problems.

This is not going to be exhaustive, but will list many of the acronyms and areas where an explanation is best served. We will assume most of the common Telecommunications and Military Signals terms are standard, for the avoidance of doubt we will always use the UK meaning. If we choose to alter that to a NATO or other jurisdiction then it will be listed below. Feel free to Contact Us to ask us to update this page with something we haven't yet put on here.

The common Electronic Warfare acronyms are excluded.

The following links are the various pages in alphabetic order for our site's use of various abbreviations and our intended meaning, {use the links to relevant pages}:

UAV - Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. Essentially a Remotely-Piliotted Aviation System [RPAS].

UKSA - UK Space Agency.

ULB - Underwater Locator Beacon. An Ultrasonic device that produces a repetitious "ping" at 37.5KHz 10ms duration every one second. The emission is 160.5dB re 1μPa and is detectable up to two kilometres away typically. In ideal conditions this can be four to five kilometres from the surface, which is generally their operating depth limits in seawater. The units are designed to typically 'ping' for 30 days.

UN - United Nations. Currently made up of 193 Member States.

UPS - Uninterruptable Power Supply. A power system - usually in-line with the mains power supply which takes over operation in the event of power failure [switching in without any perturbation and yields power typically for minutes to a few hours], whilst awaiting standby generators or fuel cells to provide more enduring power.

USB - Universal Serial Bus. A novel data bus for peripheral devices [up to 127] and the devices can each have one of five data transfer modes, along with up to 32 logical connections / pipes which are logical channels 16 IN + 16 OUT. The architecture creates a tiered-star topology. The devices that connect to this bus are either Composite or Compound. The latter are logical assignments for each of the device functions; the former is where each device function is separate.

UTM - Unified Threat Management. In the context of this website we mean an advanced IT Network firewall with strong connection management and a plethora of software tools to effect secure communications across the firewall free from known threats. 

UTP - Unscreened Twisted Pairs. To prevent cross-talk [Physicists - think Lenz and Faraday's Laws], the circuit conductors have a very carefully chosen dielectric insulator and the length of the single twist is carefully selected to reduce EMI and other parasitic effects of adjacent conductors / circuits. The need for an overall bundle screen or an individual pair of conductors screen [typically a foil wrapped longitudinally end-to-end continuously - sometimes also with a single bare conductor] is not needed. c.f. STP has a screen!

UUV - Unmanned Underwater Vehicle. Essentially a Remotely-Operated Vehicle [ROV] used underwater in a maritime environment, although autonomy is removing the remotely-operated need as technology evolves.

VDE - Verband der Elektrotechnik, Elektronik und Informationstechnik. Europe's largest technical-scientific association and developer of standards and safety regulations.

VDU - Visual Display Unit. Monitor Screen or other display device.

VE Day - Victory in Europe Day. See our Security & Remembrance page for more details.

VLSI - Very Large Scale Integration. This is the onward miniaturisation of the component designs that are embedded in Integrated Circuits on wafers of Silicon or other substrates. Modern advances in techniques are approaching the limits of those techniques and it is now commonplace to have devices with over a billion transistors. NEMS is step-change forward for these fabrication approaches,

VoIP - Voice over Internet Protocol. Traditionally this was developed to enable voice communications across the Internet and enhanced for multimedia sessions at a later point. Consequently there are a fair few protocols now for unsecure and secure VoIP communications.