1. A lightweight reconfigurable communications architecture (RCA) radio system, comprising: an operating system for managing processes running on the system; an Object Request Broker (ORB) process configured for enabling inter-process communication within the system; an Application Launcher process configured for at least one of requesting and accepting RCA compliant applications via the ORB process; and a subset of a RCA core framework configured to provide functionality that allows the compliant applications to operate.