Comms, datalinks & PNT

Strip a drone program down to its failure modes and two dominate: the datalink gets jammed, or the GPS gets spoofed. Everything else is replaceable. That makes this chokepoint less about hardware than about certified resilience — and certification is where the moats live.

Assured GPS silicon. The U.S. military's anti-jam navigation runs on M-code, and the receiver franchise sits with BAE Systems' Cedar Rapids operation, acquired from Collins Aerospace in 2020. Its MicroGRAM-M — the world's smallest M-code receiver, built for small UAS and planned at roughly 20,000 units a year — is the part you cannot design out if you want a small U.S. drone that navigates under jamming: L3Harris and Raytheon also field security-certified M-code receivers under the military GPS user equipment program, but not at this form factor. The moat is not the silicon; it is GPS Directorate security certification plus ITAR, a multi-year gate any competitor must re-run from scratch.

Contested datalinks. Ukraine settled the architecture argument: self-healing MANET mesh beats point-to-point. Motorola Solutions paid $4.4 billion for Silvus Technologies (closed August 2025) largely because Silvus radios were already flying Ukrainian drones, while Doodle Labs' DIU-sponsored Helix Mesh Rider sits on the Blue UAS cleared list alongside cleared radios from Silvus, Microhard and Persistent Systems — and the Blue list is the de facto procurement gate for U.S. defense drones. One tier up, L3Harris holds the leading Link 16 terminal franchise after its $1.96B purchase of Viasat's tactical data link business — the standard itself is DoD/NATO-governed, and the BAE–Collins Data Link Solutions JV remains the other major terminal producer, but the installed-base moat is measured in decades of fielded terminals.

Out-of-band PNT and global C2. Iridium is quietly assembling the fallback for when GPS and line-of-sight RF both fail. Its Satelles acquisition delivered STL, a timing-and-location signal roughly 1,000x stronger than GPS broadcast from 66 crosslinked LEO satellites, with management guiding to $100M+ in annual service revenue by 2030 — while Iridium's service partners pitch Certus 100 as the global C2 failover link for BVLOS drones (partner marketing, but the L-band physics behind it is real). Global L-band spectrum rights plus a freshly replenished constellation is a moat no startup can spend through quickly.

What breaks it. Three attack vectors. From below: Ukraine-forged commodity radios at a tenth the price — but Blue UAS and NDAA country-of-origin rules lock them out of U.S. programs, which paradoxically hardens incumbent pricing. From above: Starlink-class broadband bolted onto drones, a real threat to niche L-band links but not to certified safety-of-flight C2. From the side: NextNav's terrestrial 900 MHz PNT network, a genuine GPS backup if — and only if — the FCC grants the band reconfiguration now in rulemaking. Every path runs through a regulator or a certification authority; none is fast.

The reprice. The FAA's Part 108 BVLOS rule — NPRM comments closed October 2025, final rule already past the executive order's 240-day deadline — converts redundant, certified C2 links from best practice into law for scaled drone operations, instantly enlarging the addressable market for every certified datalink and satcom vendor. Nearer term: Iridium's late-July print is the cleanest read on STL monetization. Motorola's August 6 quarter gives integration color on Silvus, but the organic-growth reveal waits for the Q3 print around November — the first quarter that even partially laps the August 2025 close of the only at-scale drone MANET franchise the U.S. public market can buy (Codan's DTC unit trades in Sydney).