Evolving jamming, drone threats causing big changes in the RF hardware industry
NewsJuly 22, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. The rapid spread of drones, jamming systems, and frequency-agile threats is changing what defense customers expect from radio-frequency hardware, an industry source said during a recent interview.
Mike Penta, chief growth officer at EPIQ Solutions, says that customers aren't interested in waiting years for a system to be built around a fixed mission, opting instead for software-defined radios they can obtain, demonstrate, and reconfigure within months -- or sometimes days.
EPIQ is currently working on radio and processing products intended to cover missions ranging from wide-area spectrum monitoring to artificial intelligence (AI) processing aboard small uncrewed platforms. One example is the company’s NDR684, a four-channel software-defined radio (SDR) designed for airborne, vehicle, and fixed-site applications. The system covers frequencies from 1 MHz to 18 GHz and provides as much as 500 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth on each channel. Its channels are intended to operate independently for spectrum searches or coherently for direction finding, while digitized data can be sent through a 100 Gigabit Ethernet interface using VITA 49 packets.
That combination is aimed at environments where signals of interest may be surrounded by civilian communications, broadcast transmissions, jamming, and other high-power emitters.
“There are probably very few places that are as rich for AI as the RF spectrum,” Penta said. “You have a defined data set coming in, and you’re looking for the needle in the haystack -- the dangerous signal in a highly congested and jammed environment.”
Machine-learning applications can help classify the collected signals and flag activity that does not match known patterns. They can also be trained to locate a previously captured signal signature within a congested environment, Penta said. That capability could support electronic intelligence, communications intelligence, direction finding, and counter-uncrewed aerial system missions.
EPIQ is also moving wideband RF collection into direct-sampling architectures. For example, the Matchstiq V40 combines an Analog Devices AD9084 radio-frequency converter with an AMD Versal adaptive system-on-chip, and the company’s VNX+ Development Platform packages radio, graphics processing, and general-purpose computing resources into a VITA 90-based system.
“The proliferation of AI leads to the question of how you do this in very small systems,” Penta said. “You can’t take a large VPX chassis and put it in a missile or on a small-form-factor drone. A VNX+ solution opens up that world of smaller, SWaP-constrained platforms.”
The broader goal is to give developers a common hardware base that can be reused across demonstrations and programs. Instead of designing a new radio for each proposal, contractors can modify software, algorithms, and waveforms while retaining the underlying platform.
“The market is moving toward software-defined electronic warfare, and you can’t do that if you can’t define the radio at the heart of the system,” Penta said.
That flexibility is becoming more important as customers demand working demonstrations instead of early-stage concepts. That means today, the expectation is simple: "Show up and demonstrate something," Penta says. "Don’t show up with a PowerPoint.”
