AGENDA HIGHLIGHT

DTM26's defence programme draws from the operational and policy side — the former generals, MoD officials and serving innovation leads who shape the demand signal that primes and startups respond to. Together they cover NATO command, UK national defence, and the institutional reform and current procurement interface of Germany's Bundeswehr. Four of them are worth blocking time for:

DTM26 takes place on 20–21 May in Berlin. Defence-track sessions across both days include the Titans of Europe main stage panels, the invite-only Signals from the Frontline roundtables, and the DTM100 defence semi-finals.

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TECHNOLOGY DEEP-DIVE

For years, the standard way of breaking down autonomous drone development was to sequence it in three layers. Perception sees the world. Autonomy decides what to do. Comms reports back to the operator. Of the three, comms was the cheap, solved part: a 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz radio, a few miles of range, video running over an off-the-shelf protocol.

In the contested electromagnetic environment that has become the default for any serious European defence platform, that picture has inverted. Autopilots and perception stacks are now better than the link they depend on. The data link, not the autopilot, is what determines how far a drone can go and how long it can stay there.

The Russian electronic warfare posture in eastern Ukraine combines four distinct capabilities.

Broadband barrage jamming covers wide swathes of the spectrum at high power, denying any unhardened narrowband link in the affected zone. Sweep jamming walks a narrower jamming signal across a frequency range fast enough to disrupt frequency-hopping waveforms with predictable hop patterns. Reactive (or cognitive) jamming uses receivers to detect a transmission, classify it, and direct jamming energy at the specific frequencies and timing in use. It is a closed-loop system that can defeat naïve hopping schemes within milliseconds. And direction-finding combined with electronic kill chains turns any unencrypted, identifiable emission into a target coordinate.

The implication is structural. A drone that emits in a predictable way, on a predictable frequency, with a predictable waveform, is solving its adversary's targeting problem for them. Survival requires the data link to be jammed-into rather than jammed-out-of: the link must continue operating inside the contested band rather than running away from it.

The first layer of the answer is waveform agility. Modern military-grade drone links combine fast frequency hopping (hundreds to thousands of hops per second), direct-sequence spread spectrum to spread power across a wide bandwidth, and adaptive power control that drops emission strength to the minimum the receiver requires.

The waveform is generated in software on a software-defined radio, a flexible RF front-end whose behaviour is determined by firmware rather than by the analogue circuit it ships with.

SDRs have been packaged for drone integration over the last three years. The current generation fits into a 100 to 200 gram, 5 to 10 W envelope, integrates with standard autopilot stacks, and is reconfigurable in flight. That last property is what matters operationally. A drone can detect that its link is being attacked, characterise the attack, and switch waveform without a hardware swap.

The European companies building drone-grade SDRs and the waveforms that run on them are at the same level of strategic importance as the autonomy primes themselves and a meaningfully smaller portion of the ecosystem.

Waveform agility on a single link buys you a longer mean-time-to-kill against a determined jammer. It does not buy you survivability.

The structural answer is to stop relying on a single link at all. A mesh network treats every drone, every ground node, and every relay aircraft as a router that can forward traffic on behalf of any other node. If a node is jammed or destroyed, traffic re-routes through the surviving nodes automatically. The network heals. The mission continues.

The protocol layer that makes this work is well-trodden territory in the open-source world. B.A.T.M.A.N. (Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Networking), OLSR, and Babel are production-grade mesh routing protocols that have been deployed in civilian community networks for over a decade. The defence adaptations focus on three modifications: very high mobility (B.A.T.M.A.N.-V handles 100+ km/h node movement reasonably, with current research pushing further), encrypted control-plane traffic so the topology itself is not observable, and quality-of-service prioritisation that keeps a small command channel alive even when the high-bandwidth video link is degraded.

Several European teams have built proprietary stacks on top of these foundations. A smaller number have built genuinely novel routing protocols designed from first principles for contested environments.

The architectural shift the mesh enables is the use of cheap, attritable drones as communications relays. A long-range platform on a strike or ISR mission no longer needs to maintain a direct line to the ground station. It talks to the nearest mesh node, which talks to the next, and so on, until traffic reaches a hardened relay or a satellite uplink. The reach of the network is the reach of the swarm, not the reach of any individual link.

This is the same architectural principle that makes Starlink hard to defeat: many cheap nodes, each individually replaceable, with software-defined routing between them. At drone scale, with ranges of tens of kilometres per hop and node populations in the hundreds, the result is a comms fabric that an adversary cannot meaningfully disrupt without a level of effort that exceeds the value of the disruption. Distributed mass is, in this sense, a comms architecture before it is a kinetic one.

The current research frontier is cognitive radio: SDRs that observe the spectrum continuously, classify the patterns of interference they see, and adapt frequency, power, and waveform parameters in response. The classical approach uses signal-processing heuristics. The modern approach uses reinforcement-learning agents trained against jamming environments to learn policies that generalise to attack patterns the agent has never seen.

There is a defence-tech founder thesis embedded in this. The company that ships the first credibly cognitive drone radio, one that operates in fully unsupervised mode in a contested band and outperforms a hand-tuned hopping scheme, will have built a primitive that every European autonomy company needs and almost none can build internally. The market is the autonomy stack itself. The sales motion is integration with existing platform vendors. The technical bar is high, but the strategic position once it is cleared is among the strongest available in the European defence-tech market.

The European autonomy primes (Helsing, Quantum Systems, Tekever, Auterion-integrated platforms) have visibly invested in their comms stacks over the past eighteen months, but the layer is still under-capitalised relative to its strategic importance. A serious European mesh-comms and SDR-waveform vendor stack is one of the clearest white-space opportunities in the current defence-tech landscape.

The procurement pull is unambiguous. Every AGILE, EDF, and EUDIS programme that funds an autonomous platform implicitly funds the comms layer that platform requires. Founders building in this space have a roadmap of customers willing to take meetings before the company has a working prototype.

CURATED EVENTS

Two weeks after Kyiv, the hackathon moves to Prague — 100+ engineers, three days of build, and a closing detail that says more than any pitch deck: Demo Day is on a field. Not a stage. Teams show their work where the work is supposed to function, in front of military personnel with hands-on operational experience. Participants pick from the curated challenge set or bring their own project; the explicit objective is a deployment trajectory, not a prototype.

Builders only during the hack. A Community Visitor ticket gets you into Sunday's Demo Day — the only public window into what the teams have built, and uniquely this edition the only chance to see it demonstrated in the field. EDTH Community membership (free for one year) covers all demo days, webinars, networking sessions, and the New Defense Summit.

→ Register for the European Defense Tech Hackathon — Prague