The part of a drone that decides whether it lives or dies over Ukraine is not the airframe, the camera, or the warhead. It is the radio — the small, unglamorous module that keeps a machine talking to the human trying to fly it while the other side pours energy into the spectrum to sever that link. And according to two industry reports published this week, that radio is quietly becoming one of the drone sector's scarcest components.
On July 20, 2026, C4ISRNET reported that Doodle Labs, a Singapore-based maker of jam-resistant mesh radios, is exploring production partnerships in the United States and Europe within the next two years. The company, which currently manufactures in Singapore, framed the move around access to Western defense procurement — specifically, the incentives attached to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and "Made in America" preferences that increasingly gate what hardware US forces and their allies are allowed to buy. Doodle Labs told the outlet it can already build "tens of thousands of radios a month, millions of radios a year," and that demand is surging out of Ukraine, where operators are flying against Russian electronic-warfare systems.
"Vehicles with jammers, tanks with jammers," is how Ira Hughes, the company's senior director of sales, described the environment customers are buying against in the C4ISRNET piece, written by Poland correspondent Jaroslaw Adamowski. It is a blunt summary of why a components story has become a strategic one.
What actually makes a radio "jam-resistant"
The threat these radios are built to survive is not a single blast of noise but an adaptive contest. Modern military jammers scan the spectrum, find the frequency a drone is using, and concentrate energy there to drown out the control and video links. The counter is a radio that refuses to sit still — one that hops rapidly across frequencies faster than a jammer can chase it, and that meshes multiple nodes together so the network reroutes rather than collapses when any single link is attacked.
Doodle Labs' own product materials describe its long-range MANET (mobile ad-hoc network) mesh radios for drones and robotics as built around anti-jamming resiliency and a wide frequency range, aimed at contested environments. In practice, that means a radio that treats a jammer not as a wall but as terrain to route around.
The company put a new face on that pitch days before the production-siting news. In a July 21 feature titled "Invisible Enablers," Inside Unmanned Systems reported that Doodle Labs debuted the Nano2, a MANET radio weighing just 48.3 grams — light enough to matter on the small quadcopters and loitering drones that dominate the Ukrainian front — with a feature it calls "Sense EW" that automatically hops frequencies in response to detected interference. Co-CEO Ashish Parikh told the outlet that customers want "frequency agility in the face of smart jammers," and said the company can build 200,000 radios per year.
A three-company chokepoint
What makes this more than a single vendor's growth story is that the jam-resistant mesh-radio market is narrow. The Inside Unmanned Systems feature profiled three companies as the dominant players in the space: TrellisWare, Doodle Labs, and Silvus. Between them, they supply much of the connective tissue that lets Western drones operate as networks rather than as individual aircraft dependent on a single fragile link.
That concentration is the story. Airframes can be assembled almost anywhere; motors, batteries, and even payloads have broad supplier bases. The resilient radio is different — a specialized piece of hardware and signal-processing software that a handful of firms have spent years refining, and that cannot be improvised at scale by a garage operation. When demand spikes, as it has, the bottleneck lands on exactly these companies.
The pressure the sector is responding to is not just volume but cost and survivability at once. Inside Unmanned Systems framed the race among the three makers as one to cut cost and scale volume, quoting the blunt operating assumption now driving the field: "the luxury of operating uncontested in the spectrum is of the past." Customers, the reporting indicates, increasingly want networks that figure the electromagnetic environment out on their own under smart jamming — and that leave signals hard to trace back to the operators sending them, a survival requirement when the enemy is hunting the radio emission as eagerly as the drone itself.
Why the factory location matters as much as the factory
Doodle Labs' interest in US and European sites is not only about capacity. It is about eligibility. NDAA provisions and "Made in America" incentives increasingly determine which components can be designed into systems bought with US defense dollars, and allied procurement often follows suit. A radio built in Singapore can be excellent and still be locked out of contracts that a domestically produced equivalent would win. Standing up Western production, then, is as much a market-access decision as a logistics one — a way to move the company's hardware from "capable" to "buyable" for the customers generating the demand.
The two-year horizon the company gave C4ISRNET is worth reading plainly: it is an intention to explore partnerships, not an announced, sited, and funded plant. But the direction of travel is unambiguous. A Singapore manufacturer publicly courting NDAA-aligned production is a signal that the center of gravity for this component is being pulled toward the Western militaries fighting — and arming others to fight — in contested spectrum.
Why It Matters
Western defense planning increasingly bets on drone mass — thousands of cheap, attritable aircraft overwhelming an adversary. That bet quietly assumes the radios exist to keep those aircraft controllable under electronic attack. This week's reporting exposes the assumption as a supply-chain question. If jam-resistant mesh radios come from a short list of firms, and if Ukraine's war is already straining their output, then the radio — not the airframe — is the component that decides whether drone mass survives first contact with a serious jammer. Doodle Labs' claimed capacity (200,000 radios a year in the Inside Unmanned Systems account, "millions" in its broader C4ISRNET framing) and its push toward NDAA-eligible Western production are both attempts to widen a chokepoint that customers are feeling right now. Where these radios get built, how fast, and whether they qualify for Western contracts are not procurement footnotes. They are among the factors that will determine whether the drones flying off allied assembly lines can actually be flown when it counts.
